Boots (company)
UK based pharmacy shop chain
Boots UK Limited (formerly Boots the Chemists Limited) is a British health and beauty retailer and pharmacy chain that operates in the United Kingdom.
The former parent company, The Boots Company plc, merged with Alliance UniChem in 2006 to form Alliance Boots. In 2007, Alliance Boots was bought by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Stefano Pessina, taking the company private, and moving its headquarters to Switzerland, making it the first-ever FTSE 100 company to be bought by a private equity firm. In 2012, Walgreens acquired a 45% stake in Alliance Boots, with the option to purchase the remaining shares within three years. It exercised this option in 2014, resulting in Boots becoming a subsidiary of the newly formed Walgreens Boots Alliance on 31 December 2014. In August 2025, Sycamore Partners completed a $10 billion acquisition of Walgreens Boots Alliance and spun off Boots into a standalone private company, The Boots Group, which includes various international assets formerly held by Walgreens Boots Alliance. It is owned by Sycamore Partners and Stefano Pessina and his family.
The current parent company, The Boots Group has 3,912 shops around the world, 66,400 employees and annual sales of $23.6 billion. It owns shops in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Mexico and Thailand, holds retail investments in China, and operates a franchise model in the Middle East and Indonesia.
Boots is one of the largest retailers in the UK and Ireland, both in terms of revenue and the number of shops.
“Boots (company)” enters the record as uK based pharmacy shop chain. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Boots, company and based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6123139. VIAF identifies the subject as 133486376. The Library of Congress control number is nb2018007700. 1 of 10 selected statements include explicit references; 7 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2007, 2012 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Boots (company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.