Walgreens Appoints Starbucks Executive Roz Brewer As CEO

Shares of Walgreens, which have a market value of around $ 43 billion, rose 7.4% after hours following the Wall Street Journal report.

Starbucks said Tuesday that Ms Brewer was leaving at the end of February for a new position at another state-owned company. Prior to joining the coffee shop chain, Ms Brewer was CEO of Walmart Inc. of

Sam’s Club division for five years.

Ms. Brewer, 58, has been the COO and a member of the Starbucks Board of Directors since 2017. She has helped Starbucks focus on the operations to be performed during the pandemic and has worked to diversify the leadership of the company. Starbucks said last fall it would tie executive pay to increased minority representation in its workforce and commissioned anti-bacterial training for company executives.

In 2019, Ms. Brewer joined the board of directors of Amazon.com Inc.

amid the pressure on the company to add more diversity to its board. Amazon has grown more and more in the healthcare arena, increasingly becoming a competitor to companies such as Walgreens and CVS. In 2018, Amazon bought online pharmacy PillPack for $ 1 billion.

Walgreens, the largest drugstore chain in the United States, is struggling to recover, an effort complicated by the coronavirus pandemic. Mr Pessina, an Italian billionaire, took over five years ago following the merger of Walgreens and European drugstore chain Alliance Boots.

Where rival CVS Health Corp.

Became a health freak thanks to the acquisitions of Pharmacy Benefits Manager Caremark in 2006 and insurer Aetna Inc., Walgreens moved away from global acquisitions after failed attempts to buy insurer Humana Inc.

and rival drugstore Rite Aid Corp.

Walgreens recently announced plans to sell much of its wholesale pharmacy business in Europe, focusing on its eponymous US chain and Boots pharmacy chain in the UK.

Reduced store traffic amid the coronavirus pandemic is exacerbating Walgreens’ retail struggles, and the company’s efforts to transform into a healthcare provider have yet to take root. The company is also expected to play a central role in administering the Covid-19 vaccine to the American public. With CVS, Walgreens worked with the federal government to administer doses in long-term care facilities nationwide.

In its final quarter, the drugstore chain’s profits fell 25% even as overall revenue increased and the company worked to keep costs down. Retail drugstore sales in the United States grew 1.6%, well below expectations, and executives said prescription volumes were lower than expected.

Last year, Walgreens was among the worst performing members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with its shares falling 29.4%. The index gained 7.3% in 2020.

The first African American and the first woman to run a Walmart business unit, Ms Brewer joined the retail giant in 2006 after two decades at Kimberly-Clark Corp.

, where she started as a chemist. She is a graduate of Spelman College, where she chairs the board.

There are four black CEOs in the Fortune 500: Kenneth Frazier of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co.,

Marvin Ellison of the Lowe’s Cos hardware chain.,

Roger Ferguson Jr. of TIAA, a financial services company, and René Jones, who heads M&T Bank Corp.

At New York.

The number of women at the helm of Fortune 500 companies hit an all-time high last year at age 37 and over have since been appointed.

Write to Dana Mattioli at [email protected] and Cara Lombardo at [email protected]