Nottingham-based pharmacy and healthcare business Boots could soon be owned by the eighth richest man in the world. A bid is rumoured to have been launched for the business together by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani and US private equity giant Apollo Global.
Mr Ambani's Reliance Industries is working with New York-based Apollo on a deal that could see the high street chemist open in India and across Asia, according to the Financial Times. It is unclear how the company would be split up within the bid, but sources have told FT that he 65-year-old would take a stake in Boots alongside Apollo.
The battle to buy the 173-year-old business rumbles on, with a winner unlikely to be announced before June, reports Business Live. Britain's biggest chemist has been up for sale since January as its owner, US giant Walgreens, looks to increase its focus on US healthcare.
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Other bidders who have made pitches for Nottinghamshire's largest company include private equity giants TDR Capital and Sycamore, which is also interested in Ted Baker. Boots chief executive Seb James stressed this month that there was 'a lot of interest' in the business amid fears the £7billion sale was stalling.
Mukesh Ambani is the founder and chairman of oil and gas giant Reliance Industries, named among India's most valuable companies. His net worth was estimated at $85.5billion, according to a 2020 profile in Forbes.
Reliance was founded by his late father Dhirubhai Ambani, a yarn trader, in 1966 as a small textile manufacturer and after his father's death in 2002, his son and his younger sibling Anil divided up the family empire. Mr Ambani's firm Reliance Retail snapped up UK toy retailer Hamleys for an undisclosed sum in 2019 and it is reportedly considering the purchase of ailing department store brand Debenhams.
Reliance Retail has raised billions of dollars this year from the sale of stakes, including a $750million (£578million) one to global investment business KKR. According to Forbes, Reliance sparked a price war in India's hyper-competitive telecom market with the launch of 4G phone service Jio in 2016.
During the Covid lockdown, Ambani raised more than $20 billion selling a third of Jio to a string of investors, including Facebook and Google.
