"Escalade" to pharmacies, wellness stores and the Banca Profilo club

From real estate to homes for the elderly, through biotech, spas and even from a Nutella competitor. And now it's up to pharmacies. They are Banca Profilo's investment club, an initiative developed for several years for managers, entrepreneurs and professionals seeking new forms of investment.

Banca Profilo now looks at pharmacies. Everything comes from the new Italian legislative context, thanks to the provision on competition in 2017, it has opened the possibility of acquiring pharmaceutical licenses to corporations, creating a significant opportunity for business development through the aggregation of structures in coordinated poles, as already happened in markets more mature. It is no coincidence that for the last two years, many international players and investors have focused on the sector. An interest that also stems from the crisis that the individual owners of old pharmacies are going through. A crisis, or in any case a drop in turnover, determined by the fact that the resale of medicines by itself is no longer sufficient and the structures, to render as in the past, must diversify on the model of the American and British stores. Not by chance, just over a year ago, Boots, the international player led by Ornella Barra and Stefano Pessina, the absolute leader in the sector, landed in Italy.

Our clubs are born to allow our customers to find returns that the financial market no longer guarantees, today more than ever – explains Fabio Candeli, managing director of Banca Profilo -. To guarantee our investors, we also include private equity experts in our structures who are able to manage the delicate exit phase. The new chapter of this project is called Apotek and it is a deal to detect 40/50 pharmacies concentrated in northern Italy. To finance the project, a holding company (Neo Apotek) was established in which a capital increase of up to 30 million will be made in two collection rounds.

The scenery

The Italian pharmacy market currently consists of about 19 thousand structures, for a business volume of 24, 4 billion (substantially constant in the last decade). Compared to the total number of pharmacies, around 10% of them are public, while the remaining 90% are private structures, held by one (70%) or more (30%) pharmacists organized in partnerships. Instead, in the municipal pharmacies, following the Madia reform, they have been put up for sale for a long time, searching for qualified buyers, able to reconvert them effectively and advantageously for the local community. The context of the aggregation of pharmacies now in further, rapid evolution and sees several national and international players already active: starting with the American McKesson group that with the Lloyds brand boasts the largest chain in Italy with 200 pharmacies, 20 parapharmacies and 30 others affiliated structures. But on the national territory there are already more than 300 pharmacies in the hands of investors and among these around 13 are branded to Boots, including the historic Carlo Erba in Milan, the brand of the American group Wallgreens Boots Alliance which controls 18,500 pharmacies in 11 countries with a turnover of 132 billion dollars and about 415 thousand employees. The Apotek project – continues Candeli – fits into a still favorable time window, before the increase in competitive pressure and does so with an industrial spirit rather than a purely financial one. In fact, to date the average turnover per store is around 1.2 million euros but there are very high potential for development. We will invest in pharmacies, we will develop the offer of supplementary services that take advantage of the high volume of visits (4 million customers per day). We will invest to create a pharmacy model as a 360-degree health hub, which guarantees the customer quick access to specialized and personalized services. We will carry out a repositioning of the product mix to push the commercial offer and increase margins. The market of aggregations not yet mature, Neo Apotek acts as one of the first operators and after collecting a suitable package of pharmacies, it will be able to see to specialized operators. Buy at retail to sell wholesale.

The margins

The operating team will increase the actions aimed at making the management of the sales points more efficient – continues the CEO – developing the turnover by consolidating the margins through the application of strategies aimed at optimizing the depth, quality and costs of the service. expected in the internal estimates to reach an aggregate turnover of around 60 million in 5 years. Based on the plan defined by the management and the current evidence of the reference context, the project envisages returns in line with private equity investments.