In selling a 45% stake in Alliance Boots to the US pharmacy giant Walgreens, owner Stefano Pessina has struck perhaps the most significant deal for a UK retailer since the Walmart acquisition of Asda and realised his own dreams of transforming the Boots brand.

In selling a 45% stake in Alliance Boots to the US pharmacy giant Walgreens, owner Stefano Pessina has struck perhaps the most significant deal for a UK retailer since the Walmart acquisition of Asda and realised his own dreams of transforming the Boots brand.

Pessina has been forthright in his ambitions to turn the business into a global operation – a vision shared by his new partners at Walgreens. And a deal with a US business always looked the most likely – it was the obvious missing piece in Pessina’s international jigsaw, despite the sale of some Boots’ products through Target.

The US giant is taking its stake in Boots for $6.7bn (£4.26bn) in cash and stock, and in so doing creates the world’s biggest buyer of prescription drugs as well as a retail Goliath.

Walgreens has an option to buy the rest of Alliance Boots in three years. It is a combination whose operations would span more than 25 countries with more than 11,000 stores and upwards of 370 distribution centres delivering to more than 170,000 pharmacies.

Speaking to Retail Week on the day of the deal, Alex Gourlay, chief executive of the health and beauty division at Boots, underlined the potential to leverage Walgreens’ 7,890 US stores to increase sales of its popular own-label ranges, from No7 to Botanics. It will also be fascinating to see how the UK retail business absorbs Walgreens’ expertise to expand ventures such as drive-through stores.

But it is the markets outside the UK and US that give colour to the scale of ambition behind this deal, where the combined ability to unlock capital to invest in the fast emerging markets of Asia, the Middle East and Latin America has the potential to drive the Boots and Walgreens brands to truly global scale.

Some will, no doubt, lament the fall into US hands of such an iconic British name, though the truth is that Alliance Boots has been an international business for many years. But Pessina, who has shown himself to be a careful custodian of the business and its brand, has demonstrated his ongoing commitment with a continued and significant shareholding in the enlarged enterprise.

This deal not only provides Boots with a secure future outside of its recent private equity past but now, with the capabilities, cash and relationships this tie-up brings, it has the chance to leverage new levels of global growth.

When he came into Boots, Pessina told management he wanted to “take the brand out of the safe and show it off to the world”. This is a huge step in that direction.