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.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS