Strong growth in own-brand health and beauty products and in pharmacy services will help Alliance Boots, Britain’s biggest pharmacy chain, to cope with tough trading conditions, its chief executive said.
“We’re certainly not expecting the economy to improve at all. We’re budgeting for a subdued environment,” chief executive Andy Hornby said in a telephone interview yesterday.
“Nevertheless, we believe we’re competing in attractive markets and our formula is working,” he said.
Hornby, who led mortgage bank HBOS before it was eventually bought by Lloyds in a government-brokered rescue last year, said sales of Alliance Boots’ own-brand goods, led by its No. 7 Protect & Perfect skincare range, were particularly strong.
He also had high hopes for pharmacy services like the BootsWebMD healthcare information portal and the Boots Employee Wellbeing Service, which allows businesses to combine online health assessments of staff with pharmacy-based services like blood pressure monitoring, cholesterol testing and advice.
Alliance Boots, taken private in 2007 in Europe’s biggest ever leveraged buyout, earlier announced record annual profits of more than £1 billion (US$1.5 billion).
The group also said it had cut net debt by £645 million to £8.39 billion.
Finance director George Fairweather declined to say how much it would reduce borrowings in the coming year, but said underlying cash generation would be similar to that in the year ended in March.
“We’ve generated about half a billion [pounds] of net cash. We would continue to expect to generate that sort of level of cash, excepting any particular M&A activities,” he said.
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