Who owns boots company

Anchored by iconic brands, Walgreens in the U. Additionally, the company has a global portfolio of targeted equity investments in healthcare, pharmacy and retail. Through partnerships with other leading companies, we are continuing to innovate and expand our services to improve access in the communities we serve. WBA has a presence in nine countries with approximately 13, stores across U.

About Us. Learn more. Our Business. The drugstores were integrated immediately with Boots, but the Timothy Whites Houseware branches continued to operate as such until In the purchase of Crookes Laboratories Ltd. In the Beecham Company made an unwelcome bid for Glaxo, which instead turned to Boots and a hastily arranged defensive merger.

Both arrangements, however, were reported to the Monopolies Commission and in July of that year the commission ruled that neither should take place. Anxious for expansion in Europe, Boots tried in to take over the House of Fraser, which already had some department stores in Europe.

The bid was referred to the Monopolies Commission again, but even before their adverse recommendation was made, the oil crisis of that year and its effect on stock market prices made it impossible for the two to agree on price.

Also across the Atlantic, Boots bought in and two chains of drugstores in Canada, and in it also bought 60 percent of Hercules Agrochemical in the United States. This was merged with Fisons agrochemical interests in , and the joint venture was sold to Schering in New branches of the Sephora shops in France were opened.

Boots bought Farleys Health Products, maker of baby food and adult nutrition products, in to add to its manufacturing base. In Boots launched Children's World, a new retail chain selling clothing, toys, and other items for babies and children under The following year, the company divested its loss-making Canadian drugstore chain.

Domestic drugstore operations were increased with the acquisition of Underwoods Chemists in The Ward White acquisition was largely attributed to chief executive James Blyth later Lord Blyth of Rowington , who had taken over the position only in Blyth also engineered a restructuring, whereby the company's activities were divided into four operating units: Boots The Chemists, the largest unit, consisting of the BTC chain of drugstores; a retail division, which primarily included Boots Opticians, Children's World, Halfords, A.

Stanley, and Payless; Boots Pharmaceuticals, developer and marketer of prescription and over-the-counter medicines and healthcare products, cosmetics, and toiletries; and a newly created property division, later known as Boots Properties, which managed the company's property portfolio in the United Kingdom, including a large assortment of shopping centers.

Blyth's attempt to diversify Boots into other areas of retailing quickly turned sour. Unfortunately, the U. Boots was also hurt in the early s by the high debt it had to incur to acquire Ward White. On the plus side, Halfords was consistently profitable in the s. The company's Boots Pharmaceuticals unit also faced difficulties, largely because its small size made it difficult to compete in the drug industry.

In Boots created two new operating units out of Boots Pharmaceuticals: Boots Healthcare International BHI , which assumed the over-the-counter drugs business; and Boots Contract Manufacturing BCM , which became the company's maker of mostly private label health and beauty products.

Boots Pharmaceuticals thus became a prescription-drugs-only unit. In this unit failed in an attempt to create a breakthrough drug to keep itself viable, when development of its Manoplax heart treatment drug had to be abandoned because of side effects.

Meanwhile, Michael Angus, chairman of Whitbread, had been serving as Boots's chairman, with Blyth taking on the additional role of deputy chairman. Also in Boots sold the Farleys group to H. As the s progressed, Boots began to pull back from its diversified retail operations. During the fiscal year, the Sephora retail chain in France was sold.

Later that same year, the company bought W. Although Do It All was approaching profitability by late , speculation that Boots would divest itself of this albatross was rife. The company did jettison one of its loss-making Ward White businesses in late when it sold A.

Stanley to Alchemy Partners, a private venture-capital group, for a nominal amount. Meanwhile, the flagship Boots The Chemists chain continued to keep the company profitable.

In its first moves outside the United Kingdom since its failed Canadian venture, BTC announced in late plans to expand the chain on a pilot basis into Thailand where six stores opened in and the Netherlands where three stores opened in In the fall of BTC opened its first unit in Ireland, and had seven stores there by the end of More than 95 percent of Boots's sales were still being generated in the United Kingdom in the late s.

With the rapid expansion of BHI and BCM in the s and the potential for overseas growth of the BTC chain, it appeared that Boots would become a much more international company in the 21st century. It also seemed that the success of BHI and BCM could pave the way for the divestment of Do It All and even Halfords--neither of which provided much synergy with the company's other units. It could nonetheless be said with some certainty that Boots's healthcare, retailing, and manufacturing operations faced a very bright future indeed.

Toggle navigation. User Contributions:. Then come the patient-care services paid for by the taxpayer, and the contracts Boots is now taking over from the NHS — to host GP surgeries in its stores, to run pharmacies in hospitals, to manage hearing test centres and specialist clinics monitoring drugs that prevent blood clots.

Boots gave Tony work experience in the s while he was training to be a pharmacist. But by the time he rejoined in , it was under very different owners. Still, this stood out: it was the biggest buyout ever seen in Europe. But it was led by the billionaire Stefano Pessina. Barely a few months earlier, in July , he had merged the wholesaling business he had created, AllianceUniChem, with the venerable British name.

The result had been Alliance Boots, a Europe-wide pharmacy chain, of which he was a director. Now he was buying the entire business, whipping it off the FTSE and into private ownership. A near-unknown from the continent had just snapped up a high-street stalwart — and City newsrooms were agog. The guy even sounded exotic. He came from Italy, but had moved to Monaco, the principality famous for not levying income tax.

He collected yachts and Italian old masters. With his white hair and rimless glasses, Pessina looked less like a typical FTSE bureaucrat and more like a continental football manager, here to save the ailing local side. After all, offices are not necessary when hunting for deals — and Pessina has a genius for making deals. By , when he invited Boots executives for merger talks on his yacht off Sardinia, he had already bought more than firms.

Yet the press gave little consideration to the precise nature of this latest deal — and how that might change a business delivering a vital public service. It was from that vantage point that he watched the takeover. Now, with the money men in charge, it seemed the future was less certain.

Scott had encountered Pessina once before. Whether Bill Scott was right would determine life for Tony and his patients — and millions like them. P rescription drugs, two packets of Beechams, a Shaper sandwich and some Brecon Carreg water. Over a century and a half, Boots had built up a business that serviced the most prosaic aspects of British life. Exciting, dynamic, a licence to print money?

But at its core was a stability underwritten by government money, public goodwill and a solid reputation. Outwardly, changed nothing. The pharmacists still wore white coats.

The sign outside the shop was still the same blue and white cursive logo dating back to The everyday needs and ailments of communities across the UK had been reconfigured as thousands of little revenue streams for a small transnational elite of ultra-wealthy investors, whose fortunes depended on those streams getting bigger, and fast.

To see how that changed our medical services, I asked Haslam to examine the accounts of Boots UK, the main British subsidiary of the continental conglomerate Alliance Boots. Stretching began immediately, by loading up the new asset with billions in debt. The borrowed billions were then shoved onto the balance sheet of Boots UK Ltd — and those banks jumped to the front of the queue for repayment out of the profits made by the company. Set in black ink on pink paper in the Companies and Markets section of the FT, these are no more than the technicalities of a company buyout.

Yet they amount to a dramatic shift in power. Think about that previous paragraph again: a billionaire based in a tax haven, Pessina, and a small consortium of wealthy investors and funds, represented by KKR, pick up a year-old company employing around 70, Britons. To do so, they borrow billions from a few global banks and dump most of these loans on the balance sheet of Boots in the UK — pushing it deep into debt, even though the debt has nothing to do with the actual business Boots does here.

A firm that delivers an essential social service is now private, making it almost impossible for outsiders to see how it is changing. Finally, the profits made by Boots UK are used to repay the lenders faster and ultimately leave more profit for the investors.

In this way, British money — whether from customers or taxpayers — was siphoned offshore. A few months after going private, Alliance Boots shifted its headquarters from Nottingham to the low-tax canton of Zug in Switzerland.

All very complicated, yet perhaps rather lucrative for Pessina and KKR. The company refused to give any further details, apart from to say that the sum includes business rates and national insurance. Yet business rates and national insurance are the cost any firm must bear to run shops and employ staff. A family is not granted a lower council tax bill because it has already shelled out for the electric and water.

Immediately after the takeover, that ratio shot up five-fold. This is not an academic point, but a matter for public interest. It shares certain similarities with Boots: both private-sector providers of public services; both weighed down by the expense of running old-fashioned bricks and mortar, both controlled by tax exiles Hands uses Guernsey as his base.

Four Seasons is now a prime example of what happens when private equity — big borrowing, hard charging — goes wrong, with results that may be paid for by its residents and families and even taxpayers over the coming months and years. This is not likely to happen to Boots. Whether as residents or patients, relatives or members of the public, we need our care homes and pharmacies to be reliably dull.

When financiers get excited over such sectors, the rest of us should worry. Yet Pessina came to Boots promising double-digit growth. L ate last year, I went to the Midlands to meet Tony and hear his views on how his working conditions had changed. He took me on a tour of a branch of Boots very like his own, a large, relatively new shop in an out-of-town retail park. But by then, four years into the buyout, job cuts were well under way, both in his store and across the country.

With no other colleagues around to make sure he was giving out the right drugs at the right dosage, Tony had to monitor his own work. Yet Tony claims he was self-checking on a daily basis. Asked for comment on this practice, Boots would say nothing on the record. Working by himself, Tony explained he also had to hand out vouchers for money off makeup.