Stefano Pessina: Monegasque tycoon’s pharmaceutical empire stands test of time
Stefano Pessina © Wallgreens Boots Aliance
Stefano Pessina, 83, runs one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical empires from his palatial residence in Monaco, where he settled with his wife and fellow entrepreneur Ornella Barra over thirty years ago. A naturalised Monegasque, the Italian-born Executive Chairman of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) is currently going through one of the most challenging periods of his remarkable career, as his group faces unprecedented challenges.
What does Stefano Pessina think about when he shuts his eyes? The businessman, founder, executive chairman and largest shareholder of the Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical empires, as well as a Monaco resident for three decades, is known for his long, meditative periods of silence.
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So what does the 83-year-old Italian-born billionaire think about when he looks back over his career, his achievements and his life from his Principality home? What is the brilliant entrepreneur’s vision as he prepares to pass the baton to the next generation?
“Globalisation as we have known it is over,” he told the Italian daily La Stampa a year ago. It’s a startling statement, to say the least, from an executive who, through mergers and acquisitions and full-throttle geographical expansions, has worked tirelessly to grow the family group he took over in the 1970s. But times have changed.
Now advocating a “return to a regional vision” of business, Stefano Pessina’s most pressing issue at the start of 2025, is dealing with the unprecedented challenges facing his pharmaceutical group: a drop in share price, lower profitability, closure of sales premises, etc.
Ambitious through and through
Nothing predestined Pessina to be responsible for the fate of a global health and beauty empire, however. Born on 4 June 1941 in Pescara, a coastal town in Italy’s Abruzzo region, the young Stefano Pessina envisaged a career in… nuclear engineering. A graduate of Milan’s Polytechnic unversity, he began his career in academia before joining the market research company ACNielsen.
In the mid-1970s, as Italy was struggling through the ‘years of lead,” Pessina made a life-changing decision: to take over the family’s whosale pharmaceutical business.
Based in Naples, the business was not doing well at the time. This didn’t put off the budding entrepreneur: “I restructured the company and acquired several Italian pharmaceutical distributors, in order to create the biggest wholesaler on the peninsula,” he told our colleagues at Monaco Hebdo in the early 2010s. Alleanza Farmaceutica was born, and through a series of takeovers it would later become Alleanza Salute Italia, the country’s undisputed leader in pharmaceutical distribution.
An encounter in the mid-1980s changed everything, when Stefano met Ornella Barra, a businesswoman from Chiavari who also ran a pharmaceutical wholesale business.
It was a match made in heaven for the two entrepreneurs. A love story first and foremost, which is still going strong, forty years on. But also a business partnership: the two companies merged, Stefano leading the company’s international expansion while Ornella took care of internal growth.
“Stefano likes to grow the company through interesting acquisitions. Once that’s done, I have to create the same culture so that the merger is a success “, explained Ornella in 2014, at which time she was ranked by Forbes magazine as the 21st most powerful businesswoman in the world. “Stefano and I share the same values,” she continued, “(but) we obviously don’t agree on everything. (…) We must respect everyone’s place and role in our company.”
A global giant is born
And what a company… From a simple regional and then national distributor, the group run by the Italian power couple became a European leader in the early1990s, under its new name Alliance Santé. France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco… it seemed Stefano Pessina’s appetite for market dominance knew no bounds.
This aggressive expansion strategy continued apace until 1997, when the Franco-Italian group merged with the British player Unichem. The deal opened some highly strategic doors to retail distribution, as Unichem brought its 500 or so UK-based chemists to the marriage. Alliance-Unichem was floated on the London stock exchange and became a leading distributor, with 1,200 pharmaceutical outlets.
The group scaled up again in 2006, when Alliance-Unichem merged with the UK-based Boots Group PLC, which alone operated 1,600 chemists. Alliance Boots was born. A few months later, Stefano Pessina joined forces with the American fund KKR to take the group off the stock exchange, buying it out for the modest sum of £12.2 billion – the biggest ever takeover bid at the time.
In 2012-2013, Alliance Boots had £22.4 billion in turnover, 108,000 employees and operations in 25 countries. A giant, but almost insignificant compared to the colossus it was about to become.
In 2012, a merger was announced between Alliance Boots and the US group Walgreens, the number one drugstore in the United States. The historic deal was completed in 2014, giving birth to a truly global behemoth: the new entity employed over 330,000 people in 12,500 outlets, and turnover was close to $140 billion by 2023.
Synergies, geographical expansion and complementarity, vastly increased buying power, a wider range of products – especially beauty products… it was a huge deal, commensurate with the Pessina-Barra couple’s ambition. Shortly after the merger, the Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) share price soared to a high of 96 dollars.
“The world is my office, but Monaco is home”
The couple have been running their sprawling empire out of Monaco since 1992. Like many others before them, Stefano Pessina and Ornella Barra set their sights on the Principality for tax reasons… but that’s not all. As the nerve centre of their European operations, Monaco has the advantage of being just a stone’s throw from their native Italy.
“Monaco is in the centre. It’s pleasant, and it’s sunny,” Ornella told L’Observateur de Monaco in 2014. Monegasque by naturalisation since 2012, the two entrepreneurs have made the Grimaldi Forum their preferred venue for the group’s international conventions, attracting thousands of chemists and industry professionals to Monaco.
“The world is my office,” says Ornella, “but Monaco is home.” Not that the couple are fans of society events – unless they are “used to help others.” Both executives prefer to devote their time and energy to their professional and philanthropic commitments. For example, their involvement in the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC), which Alliance Boots has supported since the early 2010s.
Prince Albert II and Stefano Pessina (right) in 2014 © Prince’s Palace
Under the leadership of its founders, the pharmaceutical group has also started to ‘go green’, favouring plant-based ingredients in the products it markets. “A large company cannot ignore the world and the people around it,” says Ornella, who feels “a duty to help, to do something.”
New and demanding challenges
But after decades of external growth and extraordinary investments, is it time for Stefano Pessina to change strategy? WBA has been going through a difficult period, to say the least, for several months now.
In 2023, the Group’s share price lost almost a third of its value, reflecting the scale of the challenges it faces. As a direct consequence of this underperformance, the estimated value of Pessina’s stake in WBA plummeted from 3.7 billion dollars to 1.3 billion in twelve months. Bloomberg also revised the businessman’s personal fortune to “only” $6.4 billion, down from $15.4 billion in 2015.
He is nevertheless still third in the ranking of the wealthiest Italians, just behind Giovanni Ferrero and Giorgio Armani. However, the serial entrepreneur, is not about to “just stop and go and play golf.”
But the world has changed, and the tide has turned, due in no small measure to the success of Amazon and other pure players. After years of striving to grow his group, Pessina is now taking it apart. In 2021, the company sold off its wholesale and distribution activities to a US competitor; in October 2024, WBA announced its intention to close over a thousand points of sale in the United States; the sale of Boots, which had been under consideration for a while, was finally abandoned in 2022; appointed in 2023, WBA’s new CEO, Tim Wentworth, put a billion-dollar cost-cutting plan into motion, believing that “the current pharmacy model is not sustainable.”
The Monaco World Women Leaders Association elected Ornella Barra Woman of the Year 2025 © Communication department / Manuel Vitali
A de-globalised world?
Adjusting the strategy that has served him so well to date, Stefano Pessina now believes that WBA must “conduct (its) business in a way that is more in line with (its) roots and (its) traditions.” Consolidating what already exists rather than continually expanding, in other words. The CEO now touts a new “regional perspective,” focusing on “tried and tested” markets.
“That’s the trend,” says the Monegasque resident in La Stampa, “the world has changed again and we’re adjusting to it. (…) We have a huge potential of pharmacies that we can make the most of. We are going to work on innovation, which is the basic component of our work.”
From their base in Monaco, the couple remains influential in the business world, and nobody would dream of underestimating an ageing but still formidable Pessina.
Described by Sir Nigel Rudd, former chairman of Alliance Boots, as a “remorsesless” negotiator, he ranks Stefano among “the most talented business people and deal-doers I have ever met.” “I would never bet against Stefano,” adds Rudd, once the head of a former competitor. Neither would we.