America’s largest pharmacy chain Walgreen Co. said this week that its fiscal third-quarter earnings have dropped by 11 percent due to a slowing economic expansion and the company’s restructuring of certain stores.
“We anticipated this would be a challenging quarter for several reasons, including the sluggish economy, prescription reimbursement pressure, compounded by a slowdown in the rate of introduction of new generics, and a lower incidence of flu compared with the beginning of the H1N1 pandemic a year ago,” said Walgreens President and CEO Greg Wasson in a company statement.
The company’s results do not include sales at Duane Reade Holdings Inc., the New York-based drugstore chain which Walgreen acquired in April. But acquisition costs related to the merger affected its bottom-line results, the company said.
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