The whole family beeps when the electricity bill beeps to another store, and the supermarket duo fills the money trap

Although the supermarket duo dominates the physical channel, the electronics market is just the "little brother".

[Reporter Gao Jiahe/Taipei Report] Supermarket duo Unified Supermarket and FamilyMart, leveraging the access advantage of more than 12,000 stores across Taiwan, have created a huge ecosystem covering logistics, catering, e-commerce marketing and other fields. Due to the advantages of wealthy parents, the duo will earn more and lose less when investing in the business. Only the "electronic payment" business can be said to be a common financial burden for the duo.

According to the combined financial report of the supermarket duo, icash Pay, which is over 100% owned by Uni-President, had an original investment of 900 million yuan. After successive years of losses, its book value was only about 476 million yuan by the end of 2025, and nearly half of its capital was burned; it continued to recognize losses of 21.47 million yuan in the first half of 2026.

Quanying Payment (Quanying + PAY), which holds 51% of FamilyMart's shares, is even more tragic. The original investment was 510 million yuan. In the first half of 2026, it once again recognized a loss of about 34.93 million yuan, with a book value of only 137 million yuan, which was like burning 70% of its capital.

Comparing the latest electricity service statistics from the Financial Supervisory Commission in August, although the supermarket duo dominates the physical channel, the electricity service market is just the "little brother". Among the actual transaction amounts collected and paid by agents that month, Lianjia Electronics ranked first with a whopping 12.4 billion yuan, followed by Full Payment with 7.2 billion yuan and Jiekou with 6 billion yuan. On the other hand, Aijin Card and Quanying Pay only had about 970 million yuan and 670 million yuan. Not only did they fail to make it into the front-end class, but they were more like "FamilyMart is your home", but when they beeped at the counter, most of the beeps went to other appliances.

The electricity branch business accounts for a very small amount of Shuangxiong's overall revenue and profits, and continues to suffer losses, but there is no sign of stopping. According to peer analysis, the main reason is of course the strategic considerations of the ecosystem, because through its own payment tools, supermarkets can effectively integrate online and offline consumption scenarios and grasp the core consumer transaction data; secondly, if the payment business is handed over to other specialized electronic payment institutions, it is equivalent to handing over precious member data and consumption trajectories, which will weaken its competitive advantage in the retail market in the long run.

Although they have fallen deeply into losses in the short term, in the digital economy era where "data is oil", the two giants of supermarkets and electronics businesses have no choice but to swallow their losses.