Stefano Pessina: the alchemist turning drugs into gold

Over 50 years and more than 1,500 deals, Stefano Pessina turned a struggling family firm into an international healthcare giant. What’s his next target? Jane Lewis reports.

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Stefano Pessina: a dealmaker, not a retailer
(Image credit: © 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP)

Stefano Pessina "has walked a long road" from his father's struggling pharmacy business in Naples to the top of the ladder of corporate America, says The Times. Last month, he "passed another milestone" when the conglomerate he built, Walgreens Boots Alliance a $64bn pharmaceutical retailer and wholesaler replaced General Electric as one of the 30 firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average stockmarket index. It has taken Pessina, 77, about 50 years and a vast number of deals to achieve this feat. In the process, he has acquired a reputation as the "Italian alchemist" who turns "deals into gold".

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.