Sean Aylmer

Fantastic, John.

Thanks for talking to Fear and Greed.

Thank you.

That was John Ratcliffe, CEO of Altair Investments, which is working with the Brisbane Economic Development Agency, a great supporter of Fear and Greed.

I'm Sean Aylmer, and this is Fear and Greed Q&A.

Indeed, there are, though the news triggered a pretty sharp drop in Sigma's share price.

If the company is successful, it would be the biggest offshore acquisition by an Aussie company since CSL bought Swiss drug maker Vifa for $18.8 billion back in 2022.

Sigma has a market capitalisation of $33 billion and would have to raise obviously billions of dollars in capital to fund an acquisition of that size or it might go and be part of a consortium.

Boots is the dominant player in the UK market with about 40% share.

Pharmacy products, interestingly enough, at Boots is only about a third of its turnover.

In fact, I think it's about 30% where they're doing really well are in GLP-1 drugs, for example, and other kind of healthcare products.

Do you think the Brits would like the advertising of Chemist Warehouse?

The bright yellow, red, somewhat overstated, dare we say.

True.

Now, look, Australian companies pushing overseas haven't always had a good track record.

We mentioned the CSL-FIFA deal.

It's yet to pay full dividends.

It hasn't been a bust by any stretch, but...

It hasn't really paid off either.

Wesfarmers bought a UK home improvement chain called Homebase a few years back, or it's probably almost 10 years back.