China’s quiet retail boom
Surging over 9%, China’s convenience stores are outpacing all retail formats, powered by tech, fresh food, and rapid localization strategies.
Convenience store retail sales grew 9.1% YoY in Jan–Apr 2024, nearly double the overall market growth.
Top 100 chains now operate 196,000 stores, adding 14,000 in one year.
Foreign brands like Lawson and 7-Eleven are localizing fast, with AI-powered inventory and franchise innovations.
New players like Three Squirrels and Cotti Coffee are entering via supply chain-led disruption.
Instant retail orders via platforms like Meituan rose 60% YoY, transforming convenience into a multi-channel model.
Retail in China is recovering—but not evenly. While total retail sales of consumer goods rose 4.7% in the first four months of 2024, one format surged far ahead: convenience stores.
Once associated with late-night snacks and impulse buys, they now sit at the heart of China’s new consumer experience. This reinvention is not just commercial; it's strategic, blending tech, localization, and format agility to capture a retail market in flux.
China’s fastest-growing retail format
Convenience stores are the top-performing retail format in China, growing 9.1% YoY in the first four months of 2024, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
That’s nearly double the 4.7% average growth for total retail and well above the 1.7% for department stores or 5.2% for supermarkets.
Behind the numbers lies a format undergoing deep transformation. Once a marginal player, the convenience store is becoming a hyper-localized, tech-enabled urban node for everything from fresh meals to last-mile delivery.
Expansion at a national scale
By the end of 2024, China’s Top 100 convenience store chains operated 196,000 outlets, up 7.7% from 2023, per the China Chain Store & Franchise Association (CCFA).
The number of brands with over 1,000 stores rose to 38, highlighting the sector’s accelerating concentration.
Meiyijia leads with 37,943 stores, having opened 4,095 in just one year—an average of 11.2 stores per day.
Its rural-to-urban growth model—where 60% of new stores in Guangdong opened in county-level markets—coupled with a high-margin “Meiyijia Youxuan” community shopping app, has pushed online order share to 18%.
Other leaders like Tianfu and Furong Xingsheng focus on regional density and local consumer insight. Their success underscores a trend: scale is no longer just national, but deeply local.