Walgreens to Invest in Alliance Boots Drug Chain in Europe With Option to Buy in Full in 3 Years

Walgreens would stand to become the largest international retailer and wholesaler with this acquisition.  Boots is very similar to drug stores in the US with subsidizing income with products that are not drugs, so again like entering a typical US drug store like Walgreens. 
Last year in the UK and I don’t know if this came through or not but the NHS put through a proposal for patients to receive their chemotherapy treatments at the retail stores.  “Chemo on aisle 7” at Walgreens in our future?  There also has been talk about the chain selling health insurance in their stores as well.  Not too long ago Steven Colbert jokes about pap smears at Walgreens in a humorous way with a news station, Fox misunderstanding some of the daily news. 

NHS-Health Secretary Submits Plan for Patients to Receive Chemotherapy at Local Retail Boots Store as Part of Reorganization

Boots also has their wholesale division with purchasing power.  A couple months ago we heard a little bit about that when a woman bought a box of tampons at a close out center, and I’m guessing these were items liquidated from Boots and found cocaine inside.  So again we might wonder how far integration will go with brands of drugs and other products sold by the chain. 

Woman Buys A Box of Tampons at Close Out Bargain Store and Finds Cocaine–Obviously Not for Internal Use On This Box

This is one to watch to see how it all unfolds and again I say everyone is selling data and making big money today all over the world and it’s time to tax some of those billions made from cheap data mining ride on the web and I also ask, how much revenue will Walgreens get from the availability of the data that Boots sells?  Walgreens made just short of $800 million in 2010 so there’s a lot of money out there to tax with “data grave robbers.  BD

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Walgreen WAG -5.85% Co. is spending $6.7 billion to buy nearly half of European pharmacy giant Alliance Boots GmbH, a bet by the largest U.S. drugstore chain that it can expand in Europe as it grapples with declining sales back home.

In an interview, Walgreen Chief Executive Greg Wasson defended the deal—the largest in Walgreen's 111-year history. "We think this is about bringing two iconic brands together... and creating something new to the world," he said.

The 53-year-old executive, who joined Walgreen as a pharmacy intern in 1980 and rose through the corporate ranks and became CEO in 2009, said he has "every intention" of exercising the company's option to take full control of Alliance Boot.

To Walgreen, the deal is a wager on a global pharmacy chain panning out as the company sees its U.S. sales slide. An unresolved contract dispute with pharmacy-benefit manager Express Scripts Holding Co. ESRX +0.41% forced millions of customers who had regularly filled their prescriptions at Walgreen to go elsewhere, as arranged through Express Scripts. Alliance Boots, based in Zug, Switzerland, operates more than 3,300 stores in the U.K., Europe the Middle East and Asia. Most of its stores are in the U.K., where its contract manufacturing is based.

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