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Stefano Pessina, executive vice chairman and CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance
Not much else about the progress of the Walgreens-Rite Aid merger came out in yesterday’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call by Walgreens Boots Alliance.
A swirl of media reports in recent months have gone back and forth about the number of store divestitures and whether the Federal Trade Commission will end up signing off on the acquisition, which was announced almost a year ago.
But in the call WBA executives did seem to give analysts further encouragement that the deal will get done, as the company had with Thursday’s announcement that it and Rite Aid are extending the agreement’s end date to Jan. 27 and expect the transaction to wrap up in early 2017.
“The fact that we have included some part of Rite Aid potential profit in our guidance, from this you can really understand that we are confident — as confident as we were before about this deal. Nothing has changed. We have just a delay in the execution of the deal,” WBA executive vice chairman and CEO Stefano Pessina told analysts.
“We have always been optimistic because we have never seen an attitude from the FTC which was absolutely negative,” he explained. “At the end of the day, I believe we have had a good collaboration — we are having a good collaboration,” he added.
In its fiscal 2016 4Q and full-year report, WBA gave adjusted EPS guidance of $4.85 to $5.20 and said the projection reflects accretion of 5 cents to 12 cents per share from Rite Aid.
“Today, we still expect the most likely outcome will be that the parties will be required to divest between 500 and 1,000 stores. We believe that we’ll be able to execute agreements to divest these stores to potential buyers, pending FTC approval, by the end of calendar year 2016, and now expect to close the acquisition in early calendar 2017,” executive VP and global CFO George Fairweather said during the call. “Taking into account our current expectations of store divestitures, we continue to expect that the acquisition will be accretive to adjusted diluted net earnings per share in the first full year after closing.”
WBA is standing by its Sept. 8 update on negotiations with the FTC for the Rite Aid acquisition, in which the company raised its estimate for the number of store divestitures to 500 to 1,000 after originally reckoning that figure at around 500 or less.
Pessina acknowledged that the regulatory approval process has been long but noted that WBA has been in the ballpark in its divestiture projections.
“We don’t see substantial differences from what we were expecting. Yes, probably more stores, a little more stores here and there. But at the end of the day,” he said, “we are absolutely confident that we can do the deal.”
The market certainly appeared more confident. WBA’s shares closed at $81.02 on Thursday, up $3.84. Rite Aid shares — which have taken a hit recently amid the media buzz around the merger — finished up 45 cents at $7.11 on Thursday.
“We view WBA’s decision to include 5 cents to 12 cents of contribution to fiscal year 2017 EPS from the pending Rite Aid deal as an indication of their commitment and confidence in the acquisition,” Jefferies analyst Brian Tanquilut said in a research note Thursday. “Given investor concerns about antitrust risk and perceived lack of buyer interest in divestiture assets, today’s Rite Aid-related announcements were certainly positives.”
