Back in April, we wrote about Meiyijia, China’s largest convenience store chain, entering Southeast Asia under a new international brand called Ohmee. Vietnam and Malaysia were its first two markets.
The article attracted more than 10,000 views, unusually high for a story about convenience stores. That probably says something about how closely the retail industry is watching Chinese operators as they start expanding overseas.
Recently on 5 September, Ohmee and Vietnam’s largest fuel retailer Petrolimex opened their first two Ohmee Express stores inside Petrolimex petrol stations in Hanoi. Ohmee says it already has 35 stores across several provinces in northern Vietnam; the petrol station stores introduce a smaller and rather different format.
According to Ohmee, this is also the first time Meiyijia’s international convenience-store format has been deployed at a petrol station anywhere.
For now, there are only two. Both companies describe them as pilots, with more Ohmee Express locations expected to open in September. But the partnership suggests how Meiyijia may approach the harder part of overseas expansion: building distribution and store networks in markets where it starts with few of the local advantages it enjoys in China.
Petrolimex has been here before
Petrolimex has no shortage of locations. The group says its network covers roughly 5,500 petrol stations nationwide, including more than 2,700 stations belonging to Petrolimex itself and another 2,800 operated by agents, general agents and franchisees.
It has been thinking about convenience retail for quite some time.
In 2017, Petrolimex opened a P-Mart convenience store at one of its petrol stations outside Hanoi. Two more integrated stores followed in 2019. At the time, management spoke publicly about studying how convenience stores could be rolled out across its network, including with support from Japanese strategic partner JX Nippon Oil, now part of ENEOS.
Petrolimex was still discussing the same strategy several years later. Its sustainability report described plans to combine petrol stations with convenience retail and other services, ranging from food and beverages to car washing and even pharmacy space.
The ambition, however, never turned into anything resembling a national convenience-store chain.
A petrol station network and a retail operating system
Owning locations and running convenience stores require rather different capabilities.
For Petrolimex, the obvious advantage is its physical network: land, traffic, fuel customers and locations on important urban and intercity routes. Convenience retail adds another layer of complexity — merchandising, purchasing, replenishment, fresh food, inventory turns, shrinkage, store-level IT and, eventually, the ability to make thousands of small outlets operate consistently.
Those happen to be capabilities Meiyijia has spent almost three decades developing.
Meiyijia got to more than 40,000 stores by creating an operating and supply-chain system that could support a very large network of small stores and franchisees. And digitisation now stretches across store operations, supply chain and franchise management. That was one of the reasons we thought its Southeast Asian expansion was worth watching.
Interestingly, this is also almost exactly how the two companies themselves describe the partnership. Petrolimex contributes its network, locations and customer access, while Ohmee provides retail operations, assortment and the convenience-store service model.
If the pilot works, each side is effectively contributing something that would take the other much longer to build.
Vietnam has taken a different route
There is also a broader retail story here.
In Thailand and Malaysia, petrol stations have long evolved beyond fuel. Thailand’s PTT Oil and Retail Business operates thousands of convenience stores under 7-Eleven and Jiffy, alongside a Café Amazon network of more than 4,700 outlets.
Malaysia’s Petronas has built MESRA into a sizeable non-fuel retail business. Petronas Dagangan operates more than 1,000 petrol stations and over 800 Kedai Mesra stores; MESRA’s chargeable sales exceeded RM1 billion for the fourth consecutive year in 2025.
Vietnam’s convenience-store industry has developed strongly too, but much of that growth has happened elsewhere: streetfront locations, residential neighbourhoods, office districts and areas around schools. Fuel retailers have experimented with convenience retail without developing an equivalent nationwide consumer platform.
Petrolimex itself now says it wants to gradually turn its petrol stations from places that sell fuel into broader “energy and service” points. The Ohmee pilot fits neatly into that direction: rather than building every consumer capability internally, a fuel network can bring specialised operators into its existing locations.
What happens after the pilot?
It is far too early to assume that Ohmee will suddenly appear across thousands of Petrolimex stations. Of the 5,500 stations associated with the network, fewer than half are directly operated by Petrolimex, and not every site will have the space, traffic pattern or economics to support a convenience store.
The first two Ohmee Express stores themselves look deliberately small. But if the format can operate with limited space, a compact assortment and relatively low investment, many more existing petrol stations become addressable.
The practical questions now: how many Petrolimex locations can support the format, what assortment works for Vietnamese motorists and delivery riders, who handles replenishment, and whether store-level economics are attractive enough to make rapid replication worthwhile.
When Meiyijia entered Southeast Asia earlier this year, we wrote that the real question was how capabilities built in China would translate into markets with very different retail structures.
We are beginning to see some of the answers: Meiyijia may not simply be exporting a Chinese convenience store. In Vietnam, it is already experimenting with different formats and with someone else’s network.
