Walgreens’ mission: To be nation’s top source for ‘health and daily living needs,’ leaders say
CHICAGO — Bolstered by a strong recent uptrend in sales and earnings and by clear signs that its massive realignment is beginning to bear real fruit, Walgreens’ top executives delivered an upbeat assessment of the company’s progress and its potential as a multichannel retail and healthcare powerhouse at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting Wednesday.
In a celebratory gathering at Chicago’s Navy Pier auditorium, Walgreens’ leaders gave hundreds of largely supportive shareholders a glimpse of a company in the midst of a paradigm shift. The ultimate goal, according to chairman Alan McNally and president and CEO Greg Wasson, is to make Walgreens the nation’s top destination for accessible, community-based health services and everyday convenience products.
“Our vision is to be ‘My Walgreens’ to everyone in America — their first choice for health and daily living needs,” a confident Wasson told the crowd.
Walgreens’ leadership is convinced the company is on the right track. Two years into the transformation of its retail strategy and health mission, McNally said, Walgreens has “transitioned from a company intensely focused on maximizing the number of new-store openings, to a company intensely focused on making the 7,600 stores we already have more valuable, productive and relevant to customers and patients in satisfying more and more of their health and daily living needs.”
Wasson spoke to Walgreens shareholders for the third time as the company’s top manager and second-in-command. McNally, named chairman in the shakeup that launched the company’s massive strategic overhaul in the fall of 2008, praised Wasson for having “led one of the most important strategic and operational transformations in [the] company’s history," and for assembling “an exceptionally talented world-class leadership team” that blends “internal talent and externally developed expertise. Together with his leadership team, Greg has developed a clear, compelling growth strategy and is executing it with focus, discipline and intense commitment, leveraging the best store network in America, enhancing the customer experience and achieving major cost reduction and productivity gain,” McNally added.
Wasson, said Walgreens’ chairman, also has “fostered a culture of innovation and operating excellence.”
The result, McNally said, has been “double-digit growth in earnings per share in the last two quarters, record free cash flow of $2.7 billion in fiscal 2010 and a dividend increase of more than 27% last July.” Fundamentally, he added, “In the past 24 short months, the operations ... have been substantially strengthened, and Walgreens has become a higher-performing company.”
Walgreens’ chairman also praised last year’s acquisition of the 257-store Duane Reade drug store operation in New York. The buyout “not only established Walgreens as a market leader in New York City, it has provided our company with great strengths in urban retailing and store design that are already influencing and enhancing the operations of Walgreens stores nationwide,” he said.
In a real sense, Walgreens has shifted much of its expansion firepower to timely, opportunistic acquisitions of strong regional chains to give it instant access to new or undeveloped markets — while throttling back on its once-torrid store-construction strategy. “Two years ago, we had 9% new-store growth; this fiscal year we came in around 4.2%, and we’re on track to hit the 2.5% to 3% for this fiscal year that we had targeted,” Wasson explained. Despite the fact that “we are slowing our new-store openings ... we are still opening more drug stores than all our drug store competitors are opening combined today,” he told investors.
What’s more, Wasson said, “We’ve acquired more drug stores over the last two years than at any other time in our company’s history.” That includes Duane Reade, Dean’s Apothecary in Boston, Happy Harry’s in Delaware, Snyder’s in Minnesota, Drug Fair in New Jersey and Farmacias El Amal stores in Puerto Rico. “Combining the organic growth and the new store openings that we are still targeting with these key acquisitions, we are now No. 1 or No. 2 in 115 markets across the country,” he pointed out.
McNally said Walgreens’ market strengths remain “the best, most convenient store network in America, our trusted and iconic brand and our strong balance sheet and financial flexibility.” Together, he said, those strengths “serve as the bedrock for this transformation” to what company leaders said will be the nation’s most fully integrated and accessible multichannel provider of retail health and convenience shopping services.
Wasson said the company has “made substantial progress” on that transformation. “Two years ago, we did lay out our plan to win and our three core strategies to get more from our core business: To leverage the best community-based store network in America, to enhance the patient and customer experience across the entire enterprise and to achieve major cost reductions and productivity gains,” he told shareholders. “I can assure you that we are laser focused on those core strategies.”
One clear example of progress, Wasson told shareholders: “We completed our 36th consecutive year of record sales” despite a down economy, with $67.4 billion in revenue. “Only one other company in the S&P 500 can claim that,” Wasson pointed out. Walgreens' net income for fiscal 2010 also rose to nearly $2.1 billion, he added.
“All in all, this was a year of substantial progress in a continuing challenging economic climate,” Wasson said. For fiscal 2011, he noted, “we’re off to a good start” with a “solid first quarter” and December selling season. “We are confident we do have the strategies in place to deliver value,” Wasson asserted.
Among the company’s highlights over the past year, according to Walgreens’ chief executive:
The opening of Store No. 7,000 in Coney Island;
The purchase of Duane Reade, according the Wasson, “the largest acquisition in our company’s history, giving us a leading position in the New York City market”;
Filling a record 778 million prescriptions, up 7.5% over the previous year. “We now fill nearly 1-in-5 of all U.S. retail prescriptions,” Wasson noted; and
A massive flu shot program, with roughly 7 million immunizations provided, making Walgreens the nation’s top provider of flu shots outside the U.S. government.
“We feel good with these accomplishments, but we have a lot more to be done,” Wasson added.
Walgreens’ “center of gravity,” he said, remains its 7,655 drug stores “located in communities across the country in the best locations.” What’s more, he said, “with 63% of Americans living within 3 miles of our drug stores, we are closer to consumers than anyone else in America.”
Additionally, Wasson said, “We are on the front lines of health care, with [more than] 70,000 healthcare service providers and growing. We have [more than] 8,000 points of care across the country.” Armed with those resources, the CEO said, Walgreens is building “the most complete national network of integrated healthcare providers a