Boots Sold for £6.7bn to Canada’s Weston Family
Wittington Investments, the Weston family holding company, is buying Boots with the Toronto-based Fairfax Financial Holdings in a deal worth $8.9bn, or about £6.7bn. The sellers are Sycamore Partners, which has owned it for eighteen months, and the family of Stefano Pessina. Completion is expected in the first quarter of 2027.
The sale covers Boots in the United Kingdom and Ireland, Boots Opticians, the No7 Beauty Company, the Thai business and the franchises. What matters to a customer is the scale and the function: about 1,800 shops and roughly 50,000 British employees, dispensing prescriptions and delivering vaccinations, eye tests and hearing tests that sit alongside the health service rather than apart from it. Hundreds of branches have closed in recent years. Galen Weston, chair of Wittington and the likely incoming chair of Boots: “Boots is one of Britain’s most enduring businesses... We see a meaningful opportunity to make a great business even better through stable long-term ownership, further capital investment, and the renewed operating focus required to serve customers with excellence for generations to come.” Mr Pessina called it “an iconic brand and a British institution”. The Westons are not new to British retail: they owned Selfridges from 2003 to 2021, and a separate branch of the family holds the majority of Associated British Foods, which owns Primark. In Canada they own Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart, the closest equivalent to what they have just bought. The family is fifth on this year’s Sunday Times Rich List at nearly £19bn. The deal still needs regulatory approval, and the phrase to hold them to is “stable long-term ownership” after eighteen months of private equity.