Losses & Profits. The satisfaction was short-lived. The american giant of the ” drugstore “, Walgreens, had not yet led the champagne to celebrate his entrance, Monday, July 2, in the Dow Jones large-cap stock market of Wall Street, in replacement of General Electric, he received quite a cold shower. Thursday, 28 June, its Stock price has collapsed from a blow of 10 %. The elephant Amazon, dreaded, fell down in her pharmacy and may do damage in the middle of all these little vials and pill dispensers if properly stored.
The heavy weight of the e-commerce has just announced the acquisition, for approximately $ 1 billion (860 million euros), of the company for the distribution of medicines via the Internet PillPack. And as this start-up five years ago has a distribution license in 49 us States, the power of this alliance has enough to scare a sector that weighs more than 400 billion dollars of sales turnover.
The CEO of Walgreens, Stefano Pessina, has tried to do a good job in explaining, with reason, that the world of the pharmacy was much more complex than that of the booksellers or grocers. In all the developed countries, the distribution of medicines is strictly regulated, and its operations are often opaque. In the United States, the supply chain involves four actors : the laboratories producing the drugs, mutual insurance companies, which reimburse them, the wholesalers and the stores. The integration between these actors is strengthened since a year with operations spectacular, such as the acquisition in 2017, the insurer Aetna by the issue of the distribution of CVS Health, or that, in 2018, wholesaler Express Scripts by the insurer Cigna. Two transactions of over $ 50 billion each.
To cushion the shock
The reason for this excitement is two-fold. On the one hand, it responds to the pressure of the federal authorities, who deem the price…
