Photo/Zhang Haini (NBD)

Masatoshi Ito, the founder of Japanese retailer Ito-Yokado and honorary chairman of Seven & I Holdings, passed away on March 10 at the age of 98.

On March 9, Seven & I Holdings, which operates about 80,000 stores worldwide, announced that it would close nearly 26% of Ito-Yokado stores and exit from the apparel business, and is expected to further focus on investing in food and convenience store businesses in the future.

According to Seven & I Holdings' latest mid-term business plan, in addition to the stores already planned to be closed, the company will also close 14 Ito Yokado stores, with the aim to reduce the number of stores to 93 from 125 by February 2026. In addition, Seven & I Holdings aims to achieve an operating cash flow of over 900 billion yen for the 2025 fiscal year.

Public information shows that Ito Yokado was established in the 1920s, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It mainly offers clothing and housing-related goods, with business formats including convenience stores, large-scale supermarkets, department stores, specialty stores, and discount stores.

At first, it was just a small street-side store, attracting customers with a variety of fresh and exotic daily necessities imported from Europe and the US. In 1958, when his brother passed away, Masatoshi Ito took over the store and registered the Yokado company. When he was doing a business inspection in the United States, he realized that the future retail market would belong to supermarkets, so he led the transformation of his store to develop a Japanese GMS model of "supermarket + department store".

In the mid-1960s, Ito Yokado signed a regional cooperation agreement to bring the 7-ELEVEN convenience stores into the Japanese market. As the convenience store business became the top source of income, Masatoshi Ito decided to officially rename the company Seven & I Holdings. After that, he incorporated Sogo Department Store and Seibu Department Store into Seven & I Holdings, making the latter one of Japan's largest retailers.

According to Deloitte's "2022 Global Retail Power", Seven & I Holdings ranked the 19th with retail revenue was US$52.317 billion (approximately 365 billion yuan), second only to China's JD.com and Japan's Aeon in Asia. 

According to the Forbes 2022 Japan Rich List, 98-year-old Masatoshi Ito came eighth with a net worth of US$4.35 billion (approximately 30 billion yuan), being the oldest rich man on the list.