Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) faces shareholder, analyst discontent. The securities class action lawsuit filed by investor Rizwan Bhailain on 12 July in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleges that WBA misled investors with “overwhelmingly positive statements” about its pharmacy division while “concealing material (sic) adverse facts” such as the pharmacy division being “not truly equipped to handle ongoing challenges in its industry” and that “Walgreens would require significant restructuring to create a sustainable model.” The proposed class is for those who purchased shares between 12 October 2023, right before CEO Tim Wentworth started, to 26 June 2024. Wentworth, CFO Manmohan Mahajan, and chief pharmacy officer Rick Gates are also named in the lawsuit. The law firms involved are Lubin Austermuehle P.C., the Law Office of Terrence Buehler, both in Illinois, and Levy & Korsinsky, LLP in NYC. Crain’s Chicago Business, Scribd (lawsuit full text)
Industry stock analysts aren’t crazy about what is happening either. As the stock remains in the doldrums below $12, Walgreens’ billion-dollar ‘cut and sell’ strategy under Tim Wentworth has not led to optimism. Full year guidance was lowered only weeks ago after Q3 results were in. [TTA 2 July] The assumption based from the Q3 call that one-quarter of Walgreens’ 8,700 US store locations are candidates for closure by 2027 hasn’t bolstered confidence from one influential firm, Raymond James, where an analyst remarked in a recent report: “We are unaware of any retailer successfully adopting a ‘shrink to survive’ strategy.”
MedCityNews’s dismal headline, “Walgreens’ Finances Are in Dire Straits — But All Hope Is Not Lost”, interestingly had no counter from Walgreens per author Katie Adams’s requests. She tried to find some optimistic voices but the best she could manage was a sanguine view from Stephanie Davis, senior equity research analyst at Barclays. She approved of shrinking VillageMD as the largest drag on Walgreens’ financials, but acknowledged that the ‘headwinds’ in retail pharmacy justified an underweight or sell rating.
UpScript Health’s CEO Peter Ax was quoted at length pointing out other factors affecting both the ‘front’ of the store and pharmacy. In the front, there’s theft, lack of staff, supply chain shortages, and consumer wallet shortages. Over in the pharmacy section, shrinking margins, lack of pharmacists, and the squeeze between the current cost of capital and Walgreens’ financials will likely hamper reconfiguring stores and adopting efficient technologies. Another factor is that the patient blending between the pharmacies and primary care has proved to be extremely difficult. Walgreens, in trying to create a pharmacy/VillageMD closed system, now sees it as low margin/high cost, and wants to offload the cost onto additional investors. (Not much different than CVS with Oak Street Health, except that CVS got to the JV point faster. TTA 29 May)
Even when locations are closed, some leases may be difficult to terminate or ‘repurpose’–and in these closures, Walgreens will be dealing with the anger of communities believing they will be shortchanged in access to pharmacy and healthcare, which knock on to the political and bad publicity that’s not needed.
The ride continues to be rough for Wentworth and Company. What Mr. Market is saying is that some very good news needs to be forthcoming, quickly. If Walgreens is ‘too big to fail’, as the Trilliant analyst quoted in the article put it, well, that hasn’t proved true for other companies in similar situations.
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