Central rebranding 'Family Mart' convenience stores as 'Tops Daily'

The franchise rights for Family Mart in Thailand will expire at the end of this year, according to Maytinee Phisutsinthop, chief operating officer of Central Food Retail Co Ltd.

The move is in response to the current trend of other convenience store operators replacing typical small convenience stores with an area of 150 square metre with larger stores, offering a parking space and dining area and wider variety of services to the consumers. The concept is similar to 7-Eleven convenience stores, which have shifted to investing in large-scale outlets during the past 10 years, Maytinee said.

Consumer trends and behaviour today focus more on convenience, proximity, presentation, value, and a wide range of offerings and services. Small retail stores must quickly adapt and develop new models to fulfil customer needs and introduce a wider array of services in order to make shopping experience at smaller stores feel similar to visiting a supermarket, Maytinee said.

Retail experts believe that Central Retail's decision to rebrand "Family Mart" as "Tops Daily" indicates that the Tops Daily brand is still strong in the market and has access to customers.

Central Retail had previously rebranded Tops under a unified business model as "Tops" instead of separate entities like Tops Market, Tops Daily, and Tops Online.

Family Mart reported profit last year after four successive years of losses.

In 2018, revenue was 17.88 billion baht, while reporting a loss of 360.2 million baht.

In 2019, on 16.75 billion baht revenue, there was a loss of 182.5 million baht.

In 2020, revenue fell to 11.88 billion baht, but losses shot up to 281.4 million baht.

In 2021, revenue fell even further to 7.48 billion baht while losses nearly quadrupled year on year to 1.05 billion baht.

In 2022, Family Mart reported a profit of 29.8 million baht on revenue of 7.85 billion baht.