The sales result of the LAWSON Business (LAWSON and NATURAL LAWSON) in April is as follows*1.
Existing-store sales (excluding ticket and gift card sales etc.) increased 4.2% year on year over the same period and the average number of customers per store rose 5.0% and the average customer spend fell 0.7% year on year.

The Lawson Group operated 14,585 convenience stores in Japan at the end of April 2021, including 141 NATURAL LAWSON stores and 675 LAWSON STORE 100 stores.

In April, the number of people with the COVID-19, which had been on the rise since the previous month, increased rapidly. Priority Preventative Measures were applied in Osaka and Hyogo Prefectures from April 5, and in Tokyo and 6 cities from April 12.
Since then, the number of people with infections has continued to grow, and on April 25, the state of emergency was issued in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Hyogo Prefectures.

Since last year, we have been implementing thorough measures to combat infectious diseases and to respond to new demand in new norms. In the face of the COVID-19 confusion, we have also changed our structure to maintain and improve sales and customer numbers.
We are working to establish fresh foods, frozen foods, daily delivered foods, room-temperature Japanese and Western sweets, and alcoholic beverages as products that support our customers' daily lives. Consequently, sales of products such as Fresh foods and daily delivered foods significantly exceeded those of the previous year.
In addition, we are working to capture demand in new norms such as rice products category, noodle category, fast-food category, and “Machikado Chubo” (in-store kitchen services).

Sales of rice products category increased significantly year on year due to strong sales of “Kinshari onigiri” rice balls series and standard products.
Sales of the microwave oven noodle series, which were supervised by popular stores around the country, and the contribution of the affordable “Choi Noodle” series to sales. In toys, sales rose significantly year on year, driven by sales of the Entertainment Lottery and character-based toy Confectioneries.
Cigarette sales were a factor that pushed up existing-store sales in April by about 2.0 point year-on-year.

As an initiative to provide enjoyment to a wide range of customers, we conducted campaigns in collaboration with famous artists.
On April 28, we began offering Wolt, a food delivery service, at 13 NATURAL LAWSON stores in Tokyo.
Combined with “Uber Eats” “foodpanda”, LAWSON offers delivery services to 3 Total companies, bringing the total number of stores installed to 1,569 in 28 prefectures.
On April 28, Panasonic Corporation and our company opened energy-saving model store in Shanghai City, the People's Republic of China. At this store, we aim to reduce both electricity consumption and CO2 emissions by approximately 20% (compared to standard stores in fiscal 2015).

Note 1: Sales of the LAWSON Business include sales generated by LAWSON stores (excluding Lawson Okinawa, Inc., Lawson Minami-Kyushu, Inc., and Lawson Kochi, Inc.), NATURAL LAWSON stores.