Boots was not sold to the Canadians

Posted on: 13 October 2026

In June 2023 Boots announced that around 300 of its shops in the UK would close over the following year. The explanation was consolidation, branches a short walk from one another in a network drawn for another era, and it came in a year when the chain's profits were rising. Few people asked who was doing the consolidating. The answer, ultimately, was a man who had once told an American business magazine, without the slightest embarrassment, "I am not a retailer".

In 1977 a nuclear engineer born in Pescara took over his family's pharmaceutical distributor in Naples, a small business in poor health. Stefano Pessina did not have a shop to run but a warehouse to keep moving, and he understood early that in drug distribution margins are thin and scale decides who survives. In 1986 he merged in Di Pharma, the company of Ornella Barra, who would become his partner in life as well as in business, and together they founded Alleanza Salute. From then on the group grew by merger, first into France as Alliance Santé and in 1997 into Britain, where it joined UniChem.

In 2006 came the move nobody in London had priced in. Alliance UniChem merged with Boots, the chain that had been part of the British high street since 1849. A few months later Pessina returned with KKR to buy the whole thing, and in July 2007 the group left the stock market for £11.1bn, £1bn of it his own. It was the first time a FTSE 100 company had been taken over by private equity, and the coverage at the time was full of the fear that a revered British brand was about to be ruined by foreign financiers.

What followed was the career of an empire builder who does not stop. Walgreens bought into the group in 2012, Walgreens Boots Alliance was formed in 2014 and Pessina found himself running a Nasdaq-listed giant from Deerfield, outside Chicago. When the shares lost most of their value over the years that followed, the answer was another change of ownership. In August 2025 Sycamore Partners took the group private, the Pessina family rolled over all of its stake and WBA was split into five separate companies. Now Boots is going to Wittington, the holding company of the Weston family in Toronto, for $8.9bn including debt, with completion expected in the first quarter of 2027 subject to regulatory approval.

The headlines have taken the easy reading, the British chemist sold to the Canadians. It strikes me as the least interesting one available.

Pessina's line about not being a retailer was not false modesty. It was an exact description. A wholesaler sees the world as flows, stock rotation and purchasing power over the drug companies, and to him a shop is the last node of a logistics network. A shopkeeper starts from the other end, from the reason someone walks in on a Tuesday morning and the reason they come back the Tuesday after.

Neither view is wrong. They are different trades that produce different decisions about the same asset, and for twenty years Boots was run by the first. It worked brilliantly for building an empire and for making money out of transactions. It worked much less well for making a place where millions of people go for a prescription or a packet of paracetamol into something that keeps evolving. Read through that lens the 2023 closures look less like a strategy and more like a reflex, because overlapping branches are exactly what a network optimiser is trained to remove, whatever they meant to the people who used them.

The most revealing detail of this sale, in fact, is what the Pessinas are keeping. Sycamore and the family hold on to Farmacias Benavides in Mexico and Alliance Healthcare Deutschland, which is wholesale distribution in Germany. The shop goes and the warehouse stays. Fifty years on the engineer ends up exactly where he started, with a consistency that is almost admirable.

Calling the new owners Canadian is technically correct and substantially misleading, and British readers know the family better than the headlines suggest. The Wittington buying Boots is the Toronto holding company that controls George Weston Limited and through it Loblaw, which runs Shoppers Drug Mart, Canada's leading pharmacy and beauty chain. The same branch of the family owned Selfridges from 2003 to 2021. The other branch, based in Britain, controls Associated British Foods and through it Primark and Twinings. Two holding companies with the same name and separate histories, which tell the same story all the same. The Westons have been merchants for generations, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The partner with 50 per cent of the equity is Fairfax, an insurance holding company also based in Toronto, and that is not a detail either. Insurers think long by construction, since they collect today and pay out years later, which makes them comfortable alongside an operator that needs time.

What changes hands is not a flag. It is the owner's mental model, and that matters more than nationality because it decides what gets measured and how long anyone is prepared to wait for a result. A fund that has to return capital to its investors within a set number of years tends to close the branches that weigh on the profit and loss account, while a family thinking about the next generation tends to refit them. Britain has had a fresh lesson in this from its supermarkets, whose leveraged buyouts in 2021 are still being paid for in the business pages. None of this is about kindness. It is about time horizon, which is probably the most underrated variable in the analysis of any company.

There is also a very concrete reason why this change comes now. On 31 January 2024 NHS England launched Pharmacy First, which lets community pharmacies treat seven common conditions without a GP appointment, prescription medicines included where clinically appropriate. More than 10,000 pharmacies in England signed up. The chemist is ceasing to be the place where you collect a box and becoming part of primary care.

For a business like Boots, which employs more than 50,000 people, that shift is a large opportunity and a slow investment at the same time. It means training pharmacists and building systems that talk to the GP surgery down the road, none of which pays back within the next quarter. It is no accident that Wittington has said it intends to invest in the stores and in expanding health services. A family that has already seen that model work in its own Canadian chain knows how long it takes, and knows that it is not built with the logic of someone optimising a warehouse.

Over forty years I have watched companies pass from the people who built them to the people who knew how to buy them, and then from the people who knew how to buy them to the people who had to make them work. Each handover changes the questions management hears in the boardroom, and those questions shape behaviour far more than any strategic plan.

Seen from Ticino, where I live, there is a footnote British readers rarely hear. The man who reshaped their chemist started in Naples, and to become big he had to move his centre of gravity out of Italy, first to Monaco and then between London and Chicago. Italy had the talent but not the deep capital markets or the culture that treats it as normal for a distributor from Naples to buy a national icon. Britain had both, which is why Boots could be bought in 2007. The same openness is why it can now pass from an American fund to a family in Toronto without anyone in Westminster lifting a finger. A country that lets its icons be sold freely also gets to watch them change hands repeatedly, and the only thing it can reasonably ask is who the next owner is.

The first trap is to read deals through nationality. "Sold to the Canadians" tells you nothing about what will happen in the shops, while "sold to a family of merchants with a long horizon" tells you almost everything.

The second concerns anyone holding a business to sell or to buy, and it is confusing those who know how to buy with those who know how to run. They are different skills and they rarely live in the same person. Pessina was a formidable builder and always said so openly, so the problem was never him. The problem starts when someone who thinks like a wholesaler is asked to behave like a shopkeeper, or the other way round. It matters most for the seller, because price is the visible part of the negotiation while for the 50,000 people who work at Boots and the customers who walk into its shops every day, what matters far more is how the next owner measures success. Anyone selling a business they built should ask that before looking at the offer, because it is the only thing that will decide what survives of what they built.