24-Hour Convenience Store OurHours Runs Out of Time, Closes 400 Beijing Locations

The time of reckoning has come for the convenience store chain OurHours (全時). Once a dominant force in China's 24-hour store market, the company has been forced to close all 800 of its stores across the country because of poor economic performance.

The brand has since been bought up by two companies: Japanese convenience store giant Lawson has taken nearly 100 branches in southeast China and Chongqing, whereas the remaining 700 stores – 400 of which are located in the capital – have been bought by Tianjin-based firm Shanhai Lantu.

OurHours was founded in 2011 and quickly found modest success. Early positive results were followed by an unprecedented boom within the retailer market beginning in 2016, when companies looked for private fundraising, securing the industry an estimated RMB 10 billion by early 2017. Riding on this wave of investment, OurHours, as with many of its peers, grew even more ambitious and announced that it intended to open stores in 100 cities by 2022. By July 2018, it had only found a foothold in ten.

However, despite the business appearing to expand, a crackdown on peer-to-peer lending in 2016 caused a financial crisis within OurHours' parent company Forise Holdings (复华置地). Between November 2018 and February this year, nearly a quarter of the Beijing-based branches had already been shut down.

OurHours is not the only victim of this rapid expansion; Lin+ and 131, two other major convenience store chains, were also both forced to shut around August of last year.

The closure of these homegrown convenience stores means that the remaining players are battling it out for corner store supremacy. Dmall and Suning, for example, have vowed to open 150 and 500 stores, respectively, this year alone.

Whoever comes out on top might want to take pointers from the Japanese imports, who, let's be honest, just do the whole convenience store thing better, especially when it comes to their fresh food selection.

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Photo: Caijing News, longsok.com