Walgreens Sells AmerisourceBergen Shares To Raise $694 Million To Pay Down Debt

Walgreens Boots Alliance has sold shares of AmerisourceBergen for proceeds of $694 million, which will be used “primarily for debt paydown and general corporate purposes.”

Walgreens Thursday night said its stock ownership stake in AmerisourceBergen, a large drug distributor, has “decreased as a result of the concurrent share repurchase by AmerisourceBergen but remains at approximately 17%.”

Walgreens has been spending billions of dollars to expand its primary care business and has used a mix of equity and debt to do so. Most notably, Walgreens has invested in VillageMD, which last year announced plans to buy Summit Health for $8.9 billion to expand doctor-staffed clinics across the country. The transaction includes investments from Walgreens, which already owns about 53% of VillageMD, and Cigna’s health services business Evernorth.

The combination comes as Walgreens and rivals CVS Health, Walmart and Amazon push deeper into providing medical care in drugstores and other retail settings.

Amazon earlier this year closed on its $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical, which operates more than 220 primary care offices in more than 28 U.S. markets.

Meanwhile, CVS Health, which owns the health insurer Aetna, has been doing some wheeling and dealing of its own. CVS bought the home care company Signify Health for $8 billion and last week completed its acquistion of Oak Street Health for $10.6 billion in cash, adding a large network of doctor-staffed clinics primarily used by seniors.

Other health insurers, like UnitedHealth Group, have long been gobbling up doctor practices and other primary care operations including urgent care and surgery centers via its Optum health services business. And Walmart has opened several new doctor-staffed “Walmart Health” centers in several states and is doubling the number of such facilities by the end of next year to around 80.