AEON's Next Five Years in Vietnam Star a 400-Square-Meter Supermarket
Supermarkets are one of AEON's weaker earners, yet small stores lead its five-year Vietnam plan. It just sold the same MaxValu format in Thailand.
[AEON's Next Five Years in Vietnam Star a 400-Square-Meter Supermarket]
Between July and September, AEON opened 12 new MaxValu stores in Vietnam. MaxValu is AEON's small supermarket format. It sits in residential areas and sells fresh food, ready meals, bread and daily goods. Most of the 12 are on the ground floor of apartment buildings in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The first one in Ho Chi Minh City covers about 400 square meters.
Under its medium-term plan for fiscal 2026 to 2030, AEON is putting about 60% of its Southeast Asia investment into Vietnam. It wants 300 supermarkets across the Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City metro areas by the end of fiscal 2030, which closes in February 2031. At the end of August it had just 40 MaxValu stores nationwide. The same plan calls for Vietnam's operating revenue in fiscal 2030 to be more than 2.5 times the fiscal 2026 level, and for operating profit to rise about fourfold.
But supermarkets are one of AEON's weaker earners. In Japan, AEON's supermarket business booked about 3 trillion yen in operating revenue in fiscal 2025 and 29.8 billion yen in operating profit, a margin of about 1%. In Vietnam, the high-margin business is a different one: AEON MALL's shopping centers, which lease space to tenants and earn an operating margin of about 25%.
So the plan asks profit to grow faster than revenue, while the format AEON will open most is a thin-margin one. And the MaxValu stores it is rolling out in Vietnam are the same format it just sold in Thailand. After nearly two decades and four straight years of losses there, AEON signed a deal in August to sell them all.
