While Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) appears open to deal-making even while merging two giant drugstore chains and shedding $1.5 billion in costs over the next three years, its biggest individual shareholder and current CEO doesn’t appear ready to buy a pharmacy benefit management firm.
Some analysts and investors seem to think Walgreens should mirror its chief U.S. rival, CVS Health (CVS) and buy a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM). CVS owns Caremark, a PBM that worrks as a middleman between employers and drug makers when it comes to wrenching better deals on drug purchases for consumers.
“This is a model that is not the only possible model to my mind and not necessarily is the best model for the future,” Stefano Pessina, Walgreens Acting CEO and Executive Chairman said this week in New York in response to a question about whether the company would add a PBM. “Maybe yes, maybe not, I don’t know. Probably more no than yes as far as I can see today.”
People seem to forget that Walgreens four years ago shed its PBM, selling it for more than $500 million in 2011 to a company that later formed
The larger Catamaran-UnitedHealth PBM would fill about 1 billion prescriptions annually, which is about the size of the
“The model of course to do a combination or to do a deal, to do a joint venture of course you must have more than one people willing to do this," Pessina said. "The different models depend also on the partners that you find.”
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