Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA -0.22%) may not be a publicly traded stock for much longer.
Earlier this month, it entered into an agreement with Sycamore Partners which will see the private equity firm acquire the pharmacy retailer for a total of $23.7 billion, including debt. The deal may close by the end of the year, and there could be room for investors to secure a small profit before then.
Is this a good opportunity to buy the stock?
How much upside could there be for investors who buy now?
The equity value of the deal is approximately $10 billion, with Sycamore paying $11.45 per share for Walgreens. There is also a possibility for shareholders to get up to an extra $3 per share if Sycamore sells the company's primary care operations, which include Village MD.
Walgreens stock closed at a price of $11.10 last week, which is within around 3% of the purchase price of $11.45. The market has already effectively priced the deal into its valuation today. And the fact that there isn't a huge delta between the current price and the sale price indicates a fairly high confidence that the deal will go through.
The one wildcard is what will happen with Walgreens' primary care operations, and whether shareholders may get a boost from them. A $3 bump-up in value would represent a gain of 26%, if the sale would come in at $14.45. But that's by no means a guarantee.
Investors may achieve a small profit, but there is still risk
When a company announces an acquisition, there's usually not much of an incentive to buy it. The purchase price effectively creates a ceiling for how high it'll go. While there can occasionally be room for significant profits to be made, that's usually when the market isn't convinced the deal will go through.
Take Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard as an example. The deal was announced in January 2022, and Activision's stock jumped on the news -- but not to the purchase price of $95; the market was concerned that the deal wouldn't go through. It often traded around $80, and sometimes even lower than that. Ultimately, it did end up rising much closer to the purchase price, but only after investors were confident the deal would happen.
While it may seem like an attractive opportunity to purchase a stock to secure the implied upside between where it's trading and the acquisition value, the danger is if the deal doesn't end up going through. In Activision's case, there was a good deal of hesitance in the markets, and if the deal unraveled, the stock might have crashed.
The same could happen in Walgreens' case. Shares of the pharmacy retailer are down more than 75% in the past five years. And with the company in the midst of a challenging turnaround, the road ahead is certainly not an easy one. Going private may help the company avoid the spotlight and scrutiny that comes with being a publicly traded company, allowing it to focus more on the long term.
The healthcare stock has gotten a boost from news of the acquisition, but it may not go much higher -- unless the primary care business is also sold.
There are much better stocks to buy than Walgreens right now
There isn't much upside to buying Walgreens today, but there is still considerable risk. With many stocks crashing in value this year due to concerns related to tariffs and trade wars, the biggest downside of buying Walgreens stock is that you may be tying up money in an investment that may not have much room to rise at a time when many growth stocks are trading at attractive valuations.
You might be able to secure a small profit from buying Walgreens, but I don't think it's worth the risk to do so -- not when there are much better deals out there today.
