Indian investment firm Reliance Industries is teaming up with U.S. private equity company Apollo Global Management in an effort to buy U.K. pharmacy chain Boots from the Walgreens Boots Alliance, an Apollo spokesperson told Reuters.
If the joint bid is successful, Boots would add locations across India, southeast Asia and the Middle East, the report says. It’s unclear whether Reliance or Apollo would own a bigger share of Boots, but both will own equity stakes in the drugstore empire if their bid is accepted.
Walgreens Boots Alliance has not commented on the Reliance-Apollo planned bid.
Walgreens Boots Alliance put Boots on the block in December as part of its plan to focus on growing its U.S.-based healthcare segment. The group has set a May 16 deadline for bids, the report says. The sale could be in the range of $6.2 billion to almost $7.5 billion, according to Financial Times.
Private equity firms Bain Capital and CVC Capital Partners have both dropped out of the bidding for Boots, and the ongoing Russian attacks on Ukraine have complicated the financing process for such a large-scale buyout, the report says.
U.K. supermarket group Asda owners, brothers Mohsin and Zuber Issa, and private equity group TDR Capital have also made a bid for Boots, according to the report. Boots has more than 2,000 stores across the U.K. About 45 percent of its almost $7.5 billion in annual revenues come from prescriptions and vaccination services.
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Bain Capital and CVC Capital, which had been the leading candidate to buy Boots, didn’t make a bid before the first deadline. Apollo made a handful of nonbinding bids earlier in the process. The Asda group offered two options, in which either the supermarket group or its owners could lead the process.
There was also interest from New York’s Sycamore Partners, which owns Staples — and whose senior adviser John Lederer is on the board for WBA — but there wasn’t clarity on whether that group had submitted a bid.
