Three a quarter, twenty a quarter, a hundred and seventy.

We lock a binary: CP All's reported 7-Eleven store count in Thailand at 31 December 2026 is 16,500 or higher. Confidence 92%.

The count stood at 16,284 at 30 June 2026, up from 15,945 at the end of 2025. Our threshold asks for 216 net additions in the second half, against the 339 already added in the first and the roughly 360 more needed to hit the company's own 700-store annual target.

This series now holds three Asian retailers locked on the same metric, and the spread between them is the interesting part.

At P-320, Avenue Supermarts added THREE stores in the June 2026 quarter — its fewest in twelve — as quick commerce competition intensified and its own online arm lost INR 91 crore and retreated from seven cities. At P-333, Trent added 20 net in that same quarter, pushing more than 80% of new Zudio openings into Tier II and Tier III Indian cities. And CP All opened 200 in a single quarter, running at roughly 170 net additions a quarter toward an annual target of 700.

That is nearly two orders of magnitude between the slowest and the fastest, in the same three months, in adjacent Asian retail markets. It is not a like-for-like comparison — a Thai convenience store is a fraction of the footprint and capital of an Indian hypermarket, and CP All is expanding a format that already covers its home market densely. But the divergence is real, and locking all three on a published physical count means the scorecard will record what actually happened to each rather than which narrative sounded most convincing.

Physical counts are also the metric least vulnerable to everything else this series spends its time defending against. There is no standalone-versus-consolidated version of a store, no underlying-versus-reported store, and no constant-currency store.

The criterion has to be specific on two axes at once. CP All is not only a convenience-store operator — the group also holds wholesale and hypermarket businesses, and a group-wide store count would be a different and much larger number. And 7-Eleven itself operates in many countries under different licensees, so a global 7-Eleven figure has nothing to do with this lock.

So the criterion names 7-ELEVEN STORES IN THAILAND, on the same basis as the 16,284 reported at 30 June 2026 and the 15,945 at the end of 2025. It also rules out the financial lines, of which the quarter produced several at different scopes: total revenue of THB 265,760m, convenience-store segment revenue of THB 123,719m, and a first-half consolidated figure of THB 504,030m.

The threshold deliberately assumes the company misses its own target. Reaching 700 openings for 2026 needs about 360 more in the second half; 16,500 needs 216. That is a 40% shortfall against plan and still resolves HIT — which is the appropriate posture toward an expansion target with two quarters left to run, and consistent with how P-337 treated JSW Steel's production guidance one tranche ago.

The count is also a NET count at a date, so closures and relocations count against it. The residual 8% is a deliberate slowdown in the rollout, or net closures in saturated Bangkok districts offsetting provincial openings.