---
title: "A Decade of Co-opetition in China's Convenience Store Industry: Lessons Learned"
description: "The annual China Convenience Store Conference, organized by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, has evolved over the past decade, reflecting the industry's journey from market exploration to standardization and digitalization. As convenience stores face increasing competition from cross-sector players like snack stores, discounters, and delivery platforms, they must redefine their value proposition and innovate to thrive."
author: "RBF团队"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2025-05-23"
categories: "Retail Formats"
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citation: "RBF团队. “A Decade of Co-opetition in China's Convenience Store Industry: Lessons Learned.” New Distribution, 2025-05-23. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/a-decade-of-co-opetition-in-china-s-convenience-store-industry-lessons-l-cb6bc26e/"
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---

# A Decade of Co-opetition in China's Convenience Store Industry: Lessons Learned

> The annual China Convenience Store Conference, organized by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, has evolved over the past decade, reflecting the industry's journey from market exploration to standardization and digitalization. As convenience stores face increasing competition from cross-sector players like snack stores, discounters, and delivery platforms, they must redefine their value proposition and innovate to thrive.

**Source**丨Retail Business Finance
Wang Xianyu

The annual Convenience Store Conference is about to be held in Fuzhou, marking the most important gathering and exchange for convenience store professionals each year, as well as a summary of the past year and a look ahead to the future.

Since 2015, the conference, hosted annually by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, has not only been held in different cities but also focused on different themes each year.

Image: Overview of Convenience Store Conference locations and themes over the past decade

Over the past decade, each year's theme not only reflects the industry's reflection on the current situation and exploration of the future but also reveals how convenience retail is seeking breakthroughs between old and new models.

Meanwhile, being in the Taiwan convenience store market, I have personally witnessed how this highly competitive, densely populated format continuously innovates, experiments, and rapidly iterates to maintain its share of customers' minds.

Today's convenience stores are in an era of "blurred boundaries" competition. The accelerated penetration of cross-industry players—whether snack stores, discount stores, delivery platforms, or online community group buying—challenges the core value of "convenience."

Can convenience stores move from competition to co-opetition, and could this become the new normal in the next phase? This is not just a business choice but a systemic restructuring.

This article extracts the trajectory of change from the evolution of the conference themes over the years, combined with my observations and reflections on practical operations in convenience stores in different regions, to consider how convenience stores can redefine value, innovate boundaries, and chart a new roadmap of "more than just convenience" in this cross-industry dance.

**A Decade in the Mirror: Industry Trends Reflected in Conference Themes**

From the themes of the past decade, we can divide them into three periods:

1. **2015–2017: Early Exploration Stage**, focusing on the industry's foundation and changes distinct from traditional supermarkets.
   - **2015 Theme: "Limited Space, Unlimited Development"**: Although the three major foreign brands entered the Chinese market in different years (Lawson in Shanghai in 1996, 7-ELEVEn in Beijing in 2004, and in 2004, Ting Hsin Group, together with Taiwan's FamilyMart, Japan's FamilyMart, and Itochu, established Shanghai Fumajia Convenience Store Co., Ltd.), the convenience store market was still in its early growth stage. All parties were optimistic about future development, so the focus was on market potential and expansion opportunities.
   Image: Lawson Convenience Store
   - **2016 Theme: "Cross-border Integration, Value Recreation"**: The theme indicates that convenience stores began to experiment with integrating other formats (such as e-commerce and community services) to explore new business models. This year was also a significant year for capital attention to the convenience store sector.
   - **2017 Theme: "Focus on Management, Embrace Change"**: In this year, the industry developed further. Brands that had developed earlier faced challenges from unmanned convenience stores, new brands, and expansion plans. Therefore, companies began to focus on internal management and digital transformation to respond to market changes.

2. **2018–2020: This stage began with the theme "Embrace the New Era of Convenience Stores," emphasizing standardization, localization, and strengthening fundamentals to lead into a new era.**
   - **2018 Theme: "Embrace the New Era of Convenience Stores"**: Clearly marking the official entry of the convenience store industry into a new development period, brand companies began adjusting strategies to adapt to consumption upgrades and intensified competition.
   - **2019 Theme: "Take the Road of Convenience Stores with Chinese Characteristics"**: Although convenience stores have developed know-how abroad, they still face challenges in the domestic market. This indicates that companies recognized the特殊性 of the Chinese market and emphasized localized business models, such as community-based convenience stores and fresh food layouts.
   - **2020 Theme: "Consolidate the Foundation, Gather Momentum for Another Launch"**: In this year, brand companies faced severe challenges. Under the circumstances, the convenience store industry emphasized steady development, focusing on supply chain and infrastructure improvements.
   In terms of national policy, on December 31, 2019, the Ministry of Commerce and 12 other departments jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Development of Brand Chain Convenience Stores," guiding and promoting the development of convenience stores.

3. **2021–2024: During this period, the keyword in each year's conference theme was 'development,' as convenience stores reached this stage and began moving towards building new ecosystems.**
   - **2021 Theme: "Create a New Dual-Circulation Development Pattern for Convenience Stores"**: Echoing the national "dual circulation" economic policy, focusing on meeting both domestic demand and global development needs.
   - **2022 Theme: "Promote High-Quality Development of Convenience Stores"**: Emphasizing the industry's shift from scale expansion to quality improvement, while also leveraging technological advancements to strengthen digital operations and refined management, and using big data analysis to improve operational profits and store location accuracy.
   - **2023 Theme: "Jointly Build a Convenience Store Development Ecosystem"**: From the inside out, focusing on collaboration among supply chains, brands, and partners to establish a complete convenience store ecosystem, further striving to meet consumer needs.
   - **2024 Theme: "Accelerate the Development of New Quality Productive Forces in Convenience Stores"**: Companies should use technology (such as AI, big data, and smart retail) to improve operational efficiency and innovate convenience store models.

Over the past decade, China's convenience store industry has evolved from exploring market opportunities (2015-2017), to standardization and localization (2018-2020), and then to emphasizing digitalization, high quality, and sustainable ecosystems (2021-2024), indicating that the industry has entered a mature stage. Future convenience store models may rely more on smart retail technology, community-based operations, and even integrate with new energy and low-carbon development.

**From Peer Competition to Cross-Industry Competition: The New Battlefield for Convenience Stores**

In the past, convenience stores' main competitors might have been the convenience store at the corner or the mom-and-pop shop next door. However, in recent years, this competition has rapidly evolved from a "ranking battle among peers" in offline physical stores to a "comprehensive erosion by cross-industry forces."

- **Cross-Industry Challenges**
  Additionally, bulk snack collection stores such as Snacks Busy, Zhao Yiming, and Haoxianglai have intercepted young consumers' daily reasons to visit stores with their highly focused low prices and high SKU strategies.
  On the other hand, the discount store wave, through supply chain integration and ultra-low prices, has taken away price-sensitive customers, making the "convenience" advantage of convenience stores less relevant.
  In foreign convenience stores, fresh food is one of the main revenue sources, but in China, the penetration of delivery platforms directly challenges the "real-time, nearby, daily replenishment" positioning of convenience stores. In the past, buying a bottle of water or a few snacks in-store was a natural rhythm of life; now, with a few taps on a phone, instant retail services like Meituan Flash Purchase, Ele.me, JD Seconds, and Taobao Flash Purchase can deliver to your door within half an hour, often with better prices and more frequent promotions than convenience stores.

- **Peers Need Not Be Enemies; Cross-Industry Can Be Teachers**
  Facing these cross-industry challenges, it's not hard to identify commonalities: low prices, category concentration, scale, and data-driven operations.
  These competitors have dismantled, reorganized, and even reversed the original advantages of convenience stores. Convenience stores are not just facing "who can open more stores" or "whose supply chain is more real-time and complete," but "when others are cheaper, faster, and understand users better, what do convenience stores have left?"

- **The Wheel of Retailing**
  Harvard professor Malcolm P. McNair proposed the "Wheel of Retailing" theory, which suggests that retail changes are like a rotating wheel: newcomers constantly challenge the strategies of incumbents, and only by continuous transformation can one survive.
  The Wheel of Retailing, also known as the retail wheel theory, was proposed by Professor M. McNair of Harvard Business School. He believed that retail organizational change follows a cyclical, wheel-like development trend. New retail organizations initially adopt low-cost, low-margin, low-price policies. When they succeed, they inevitably attract imitators, leading to intense competition that forces them to adopt non-price strategies such as adding services and improving store environments, which increases expenses and transforms them into high-cost, high-price, high-margin retail organizations. Meanwhile, new innovators with low-cost, low-margin, low-price retail organizations emerge, and the wheel turns again. Supermarkets, discount stores, and warehouse membership stores have all developed along this pattern.
  Therefore, if convenience stores want to survive and grow in the new battlefield, they must break free from the constraints of past successes, embrace innovation, strengthen differentiation, and actively adopt data-driven thinking and customer insights to maintain a firm foothold in the ever-turning retail arena.

**Meeting the Changes: Observations on Convenience Stores' Adaptive Thinking and Strategies**

According to the Japan Franchise Association's analysis of convenience store development in the US and Japan, when the national income of a market is low, most consumers tend to be "price" oriented. When national income exceeds $3,000 USD, basic needs are effectively met, and consumers are willing to pay a slightly higher price for "convenience."

For example, in Taiwan, national income reached $3,041 in 1985, and 7-ELEVEn only turned profitable in 1986 after seven years of losses.

After the pandemic, facing multiple pressures such as cross-industry competition, changing consumption habits, and digital penetration, Taiwan's convenience stores have continued to focus on integrating into customer contexts, thinking about customer needs and daily inconveniences, and continuously innovating, demonstrating high flexibility and adaptability.

Unlike large retail channels that rely on scale and price advantages, Taiwan's convenience stores choose to return to the daily details of customers, gradually carving out their own survival and growth paths through product assortment, service extension, digital tool application, and role repositioning.

- **Convenience Stores' "Long-term Customer Strategy": Membership Management Moving Towards Subscription Economy**
  Regarding "membership systems," everyone is familiar with them. With technological maturity and convenient payment methods, almost all convenience stores in China now have the "spend and become a member" feature and service.
  However, brands that focus on "membership systems," strongly promote them, and skillfully use "member data" for adaptation and strategy are limited, because people are accustomed to the three main pillars of "people, goods, and places." In fact, in new retail tools, data has become a more important area, and people who understand "data analysis" are even more valuable and rare.
  From "membership" to "subscription," people are more familiar with video platforms, but for convenience stores, it remains unfamiliar.
  The key to subscription is value, not price. What truly moves users is: do you have value worth my long-term spending?
  From observations over the years, successful retail subscription products typically have the following characteristics:
  > 1. High usage frequency: highly overlapping with life scenarios (e.g., shopping, payment, delivery).
  >
  > 2. Strong cross-domain integration: shopping, life services, mobile payment, etc., seamlessly connected.
  >
  > 3. The more you use, the harder to leave: making customers willing to stay long-term and hard to give up.
  If your brand also wants to promote membership, paid membership, or even consider a subscription economy, besides thinking about whether to subsidize or how much to charge, you should also consider whether you have designed a service ecosystem that makes customers willing to use daily and gradually become dependent on it.

- **Supermarket-ization of Convenience Stores: One Store, Multiple Functions**
  In recent years, facing changes in consumer lifestyles, competition from cross-industry and e-commerce platforms, the need to improve sales per square meter and increase revenue, and the desire to create differentiation and high-margin products, Taiwan's 7-ELEVEn and FamilyMart have both launched different types of composite stores.
  These strategies are characterized by adapting to the business district, local conditions, innovation, and leveraging strengths. They mainly fall into two types: one focusing on "fresh food" categories, and the other combining different business formats.

  7-ELEVEn:
  From Taiwan's President Chain Store's 2024 Annual Report, it can be seen that Taiwan's 7-ELEVEn continues to expand and explore more diverse composite retail combinations, including four new life experience venues, and for the first time presents a new ready-to-eat dining format, 7-ELEVEn Fresh, introducing supermarket fresh produce, meat, seafood, and various imported ingredients, as well as the incredible Tea BAR and local limited products. Additionally, it continues to expand its digital retail territory each year. "X-STORE 8" introduces "AI Smart Shelves," pioneering the use of LiDAR image recognition technology, where all store products are recognized by AI and checked out via mobile phone, allowing a "grab and go" retail experience in 30 seconds.
  Image: 7-ELEVEn Convenience Store

  FamilyMart:
  Compared to Taiwan's 7-ELEVEn, FamilyMart, with the second-largest store count, has increasingly gained customer mindshare and brand recognition over the years. Through a "dare to change" strategy, it has found a successful formula that makes customers "walk a few more steps to come." It has experimented with "Fami Super" fresh markets, offering small-pack fresh produce, frozen meal kits, and ready-to-eat seafood to increase the frequency of visits from housewives and older demographics. It has also launched "pharmacy composite stores," "self-service laundry composite stores," and "Let Cafe" composite stores. This makes stores not just places to buy coffee and snacks, but able to complete over 80% of daily replenishment tasks.
  Image: FamilyMart
  Whether it's 7-ELEVEn, FamilyMart, or the other two major convenience store brands in Taiwan, strengthening "store visit value" by introducing more diverse services and product categories to make stores "community life centers" is a trend and a common strategy. Taiwan's convenience stores launching formats that combine fresh food and composite business types is an inevitable choice to respond to community life needs, counter cross-industry competition, enhance profit margins, and expand the new value of physical stores.

**Conclusion**

This year's Convenience Store Conference theme is "Focus on New Consumption, Stimulate New Momentum for Convenience Store Development."

From peer competition to cross-industry impact, convenience stores are facing a challenge of value reconstruction. This competition is not just a transformation of business formats but a reinterpretation of the core meaning of "convenience." There is no battlefield in business; management itself must face constant change.

Take two entrepreneurs I have worked with as examples: Yue Lihua, founder of Furong Xingsheng, is an entrepreneur with high market sensitivity and a sense of urgency. Facing rapid changes and intense competition in China's retail market, he demonstrated keen judgment and decisive decision-making, successfully leading Furong Xingsheng through transformation and seizing market opportunities.

Facing the rise of the internet and the impact of digitalization, he did not rest on his laurels but foresaw that online consumption would become mainstream. After multiple trials and errors, he ultimately created a new model combining pre-sale, self-pickup, and community group buying, empowering convenience stores and developing new functions.

Like Yue Lihua, Wu Minyi, founder of Hunan Xinjiayi, is also an entrepreneur who can decisively transform when facing market challenges, focus on new consumption, develop new functions, and discern trends. Against the backdrop of increasingly fierce retail competition, he quickly adjusted Xinjiayi's business strategy, proactively upgrading traditional convenience stores into scenario-based stores that better cater to younger demographics and the pace of urban life.

Such awareness allowed Xinjiayi to successfully break through in market competition, demonstrating the keen observation and innovative thinking entrepreneurs should possess when facing change, and reflecting the adaptive thinking and strategic vision entrepreneurs should have when risks and opportunities coexist.

Today, convenience stores are facing new challenges from cross-industry competition, such as snack collection stores, discount stores, and delivery platforms. In such an environment, convenience stores need to rethink their core value and, through innovation and technology, enhance productivity to move towards the next stage of "more than just convenience."


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: RBF团队
- Published: 2025-05-23
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/a-decade-of-co-opetition-in-china-s-convenience-store-industry-lessons-l-cb6bc26e/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/CZJ0kFoVMXNQqgoGjyJFzA

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