Who owns Boots? | Highstreett

Who owns Boots?

Boots is owned by Sycamore Partners, which is a private equity firm in New York, and they have owned it since August 2025. It is not owned by Walgreens any more and it has not been a British controlled company since 2007.

Hello, this is the messiest one I have written so far and I got it wrong myself before I sat down and checked, because I thought Boots was still Walgreens and it has not been for about a year now. Boots has changed hands six times in twenty years and it is currently up for sale again, so it is genuinely difficult to keep track of, which is sort of the point of this page.

Is Boots owned by Walgreens?

Not any more. Walgreens owned it from 2014 until August 2025.

What happened is that Sycamore Partners bought the whole of Walgreens Boots Alliance, which was the parent company, and the deal completed on 28 August 2025. Shareholders got $11.45 a share in cash plus the right to a bit more later depending on what happens to another part of the business, and the whole thing was worth around $10 billion in equity and up to $23.7 billion once you count the debt. Walgreens Boots Alliance stopped trading on the Nasdaq that day.

Sycamore then immediately broke it into five separate companies, one of which is The Boots Group, so Boots and Walgreens are now two different businesses that happen to have the same owner.

A lot of places still say Boots is owned by Walgreens. It is out of date but it is an easy mistake to make and I made it too.

Is Boots still British?

The shops are British and the company that runs them is registered here, but it has not been British controlled since 2007 and that is the bit people do not expect.

Boots was a British listed company for most of its history. In 2006 it merged with a pan European group called Alliance UniChem to become Alliance Boots, which was still listed in London. Then in April 2007 it was taken private in an £11.1 billion buyout by KKR, which is a private equity firm in New York, together with Stefano Pessina. That made Alliance Boots the first company ever taken out of the FTSE 100 by private equity, and about £9 billion of the money came from investment banks as debt loaded onto the business.

Then in March 2008 the trading business was moved into a new company registered in Switzerland, in the canton of Zug, which is not somewhere Boots sells anything.

So since 2007 the owners have been an American private equity firm, then an American pharmacy chain, and now a different American private equity firm. That is nineteen years without British control, which is not quite the "decades" I keep hearing but it is a lot longer than most people assume.

Who owns No7 and Soap & Glory?

Same answer, they are Boots brands so Sycamore Partners owns them too. No7 and Soltan are the same. It is worth knowing because those are sold in other shops as well, so you can buy a Boots owned product without ever going into a Boots.

Is Boots being sold again?

Probably, and this is the part that might have changed by the time you read this.

Sycamore has been running a process to sell Boots for something around $10 billion, only about a year after buying it. The Financial Times reported that the people interested include the Canadian arm of the Weston family, who own Fortnum & Mason and the Loblaws supermarkets in Canada and who used to own Selfridges, and an Australian pharmacy group called Sigma Healthcare which is listed on the Australian stock exchange.

The other option on the table is floating Boots on the London stock market, possibly in 2027, which would actually put a chunk of it back into British hands in a loose sort of way.

Nothing has been decided as far as I can tell. If you want to know why a firm would buy something this size and sell it a year later, that is more or less what private equity is for, they buy things, restructure them and sell them on rather than holding onto them.

How did Boots end up like this?

It started as a family shop and then it got sold, repeatedly. Here is the whole thing in order.

1849. John Boot opens a herbalist shop in Nottingham. His son Jesse builds it into a national chain, and the family put a lot of money back into Nottingham, including a workers' library and land that ended up with the university.
1850. Boots Group merges with Alliance UniChem to form Alliance Boots, still listed on the London Stock Exchange.
1851. KKR of New York and Stefano Pessina take it private for £11.1 billion. First FTSE 100 company ever bought out by private equity.
1852. The trading business is moved into a company registered in Zug, Switzerland.
1853. Walgreens, the American pharmacy chain, buys 45% for $6.7 billion. 2014 to 2015. Walgreens buys the rest and Walgreens Boots Alliance is formed. KKR sells out.
1854. Alliance Healthcare, which was the wholesale side, is sold off separately to an American company now called Cencora. It is no longer part of Boots.
1855. Sycamore Partners buys the lot and splits it into five companies.
1856. Boots is up for sale again.

Stefano Pessina is the one constant in all of it. He was there for the 2006 merger, he did the buyout with KKR, he stayed on through Walgreens, and he and his family reinvested all of their money into the business again when Sycamore took over.

Does NHS money end up with a private equity firm?

Some of it does, yes, and I think this is the most interesting thing about Boots compared to any other high street name.

Boots runs over 1,800 shops in the UK and NHS funded dispensing is a core part of what it earns. So when Sycamore markets Boots to bidders for around $10 billion, part of what makes it worth that is a stream of income that comes from the NHS.

Back in 2013 a report by War on Want, the union Unite and a US group called Change to Win estimated that Alliance Boots was drawing about 40% of its UK revenue from health services largely paid for by the taxpayer, and they estimated the company had avoided somewhere between £1.12 billion and £1.28 billion in UK tax in the six years after the buyout, mostly through the debt it was carrying. Those are their estimates rather than anything from a filing, and Boots said at the time that it organised its tax affairs in compliance with all applicable law and observed the highest standards of ethics. I am including both halves because it is a campaigning report and you should weigh it as one.

I am not making an argument about whether the NHS should use private pharmacies, which is a much bigger question than this page. I just think if a business is partly funded by public money then who owns it is a reasonable thing for the public to be able to find out without doing an afternoon of research.

Where can I get a prescription that isn't Boots?

Any independent pharmacy, and there are still a lot of them.

An independent chemist can dispense exactly the same NHS prescription as Boots can, at exactly the same cost to you, because the prescription charge is set nationally. You can nominate whichever pharmacy you like for your repeat prescriptions and change it whenever you want. Independent pharmacies have been closing at a fair rate over the last few years, and the practical version of supporting one is just using it as your default rather than defaulting to the big one in the retail park.

That is what we built Highstreett for, and everything listed on it has had its ownership checked against Companies House first.

Questions people ask

What happened to Alliance Boots? It stopped existing as a separate thing in 2015 when Walgreens finished buying it and formed Walgreens Boots Alliance. The name comes from the 2006 merger between Boots and a wholesaler called Alliance UniChem, so if you remember Boots being called Alliance Boots, that was the 2006 to 2015 period.

Is Alliance Healthcare part of Boots? Not any more. Alliance Healthcare was the wholesale and distribution side and it was sold in 2021 to an American company now called Cencora, so it has a completely different owner to Boots and the two are not connected.

Who is Stefano Pessina? An Italian businessman who built Alliance UniChem, merged it with Boots in 2006, did the private equity buyout with KKR in 2007, ran Walgreens Boots Alliance for years and has reinvested through every change of ownership including the current one. He is the reason there is any continuity in this at all.

Is Sycamore Partners American? Yes, it is a private equity firm based in New York which specialises in retail and consumer businesses.

How do I check who owns a shop myself? Search the company name on Companies House and then look at the persons with significant control register, which shows who ultimately controls it, and it is free. The annoying bit with a business like Boots is that the chain goes through several holding companies in different countries, so it takes a while and you may not get all the way to the top.

Last checked 10 August 2026. Boots is actively up for sale so this page may go out of date quickly, and if you spot something wrong email alex@digitalhighstreett.com and I will fix it.