Weston family boots has agreed to buy Boots for $8.9bn, putting 1,800 stores and 50,000 workers under new ownership. The deal returns the Canadian branch of the family to the UK high street and hands Boots a long-term owner after years of sale plans that went nowhere.
The price is £6.74bn. Galen Weston, chair of Wittington, said the family sees a “meaningful opportunity” to invest in Boots for generations to come, adding that the chain is “one of Britain’s most enduring businesses, with a rich heritage, a trusted name and a vital role in everyday life across the UK and Ireland.”
Wittington Takes UK And Irish Boots
Wittington Investments will own Boots’ UK and Irish retail operations, the opticians chain, the No7 beauty brand and a franchise arm in Thailand. The transaction is backed by Fairfax and still needs regulatory approval before it can close in the first quarter of 2027.
For Boots, the buyer matters as much as the price. The chain is headquartered in Nottingham, and the new structure brings it back to a family that previously sold Selfridges for £4bn in 2022. That gives the deal a different feel from the financial engineering that has shaped Boots for years.
Pessina Exits After 2007
Stefano Pessina is exiting Boots through the transaction, alongside Sycamore Partners. Pessina took Boots private with the backing of KKR in 2007, and later described the brand as “an iconic brand and a British institution.” He said it had been one of the privileges of his and Ornella’s life to have been closely associated with Boots over the last 20 years.
Richard Hyman called the Weston family “the most encouraging ownership of Boots for many, many years” and said watching the chain had been “a bit like watching corporate pass the parcel,” with ownership changing frequently and each owner stripping a bit more out of it. That line captures the friction inside the story: Boots is still valuable enough to draw an $8.9bn bid, but it has also been treated for years as an asset to reprice, reshuffle and move on.
£10bn Hope, £7bn Plan
Walgreens put Boots up for sale in 2022 with a suggested price tag of up to £10bn, while a plan to float the business at a valuation of about £7bn was dropped in 2024. The final £6.74bn price shows how the market settled below both earlier markers, even as the chain remained large enough to justify a complex approval process and a 2027 close.
For employees and suppliers, the immediate practical point is that the ownership change is not complete yet. For now, Boots keeps running under its current structure while the regulatory process plays out, and the next real test is whether the new owners deliver the stable capital and operating focus Weston has promised.
