Dive Brief:
- Shell either closed or sold around 800 underperforming branded convenience retail sites in 2025, the oil giant announced in its annual report released last week.
- The closures were part of Shell’s efforts to grow its normalized free cash flow per share by over 10% on average per year by 2030, according to the report.
- Although Shell’s total branded retail site count in its Americas division decreased, a company spokesperson emphasized in a statement that no U.S. sites closed during this period.
Dive Insight:
Shell’s latest divestitures were in line with plans that the company outlined two years ago to sell 1,000 convenience retail sites around the globe by 2026. At the time, Shell did not share in which markets these sales would occur nor if they would happen in pieces or large amounts.
Some of Shell’s c-store divestitures in 2025 included 200 locations sold in Indonesia and 217 in Mexico. It’s not clear where the other 383 were located, although it wasn’t the U.S., “which remains a key market for paced retail growth for Shell,” the company’s spokesperson said in a statement to C-Store Dive.
Shell’s efforts to cut expenses and improve margins led to “best-ever results” for the company’s mobility business, the division that includes its company-owned and branded convenience stores, Machteld de Haan, president of downstream, renewables and energy solutions, said in the report.
At the end of 2025, Shell directly operated around 13,000 convenience stores worldwide, in addition to over 42,700 branded locations. The company has about 12,000 branded fuel locations in the U.S. in addition to roughly 200 company-owned sites in Texas.
