Over nearly three decades, Alexander Fenech has helped grow Brown’s from a single pharmacy into one of Malta’s largest pharmacy groups.
Today, the group employs nearly 250 people, and now the self-described “pharmacist by accident” turned serial entrepreneur says he has a new strategy.
The target? To build a new pharmacy business that can scale to eventually be suitable for listing on an international stock exchange. And he wants to do it all without opening a single new pharmacy.
“Around a year ago we had an offer to sell the entire Brown’s brick-and-mortar operation, which we declined,” he says. “We have no regrets, we are proud of our brick and mortar heritage. However the future of our business, and, in fact, of the entire retail industry, is evolving and we have to adapt accordingly.
‘A private equity mindset’
“My involvement with Brown’s increasingly resembles a private equity-style approach to building scalable healthcare infrastructure,” he says.
“I approach the business as though I’ve acquired my own company and I’m building for growth and scale.”
Originally trained as a pharmacist, Fenech says his true vocation lies in finance.
Whilst studying for his MBA, this became clear, and was later formalised through his qualification as a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), shaping his work as an investor and builder of scalable businesses.
That private equity framing explains much about what comes next.
Fenech and his partners have spent the past year developing a new SaaS digital platform, codenamed Oxygen, into which they are packaging what he calls “28 years of Brown’s know-how.”
The platform is designed as an end-to-end system. It supports digital patient engagement, consultation workflows, and prescription management, integrated with a pharmaceutical fulfilment infrastructure.
In practice, this allows patients to engage healthcare professionals remotely, after which prescriptions are dispatched via a mail-order pharmaceutical distribution operation.
“We weren’t born a tech company,” Fenech says. “But we’re certainly transitioning into one.”
An eye to the UK
Brown’s already operates a UK mail-order pharmacy, Mediva, and has begun onboarding doctors to the platform. So far, around 500 healthcare professionals have signed up, with a target of 4,000 by the end of 2027.
The ambition is to build a scalable, internationally deployable healthcare ecosystem, not simply a digital storefront for an existing retail model.
“We’ve developed a digital offering for the UK that we believe is the way forward,” Fenech explains.
“It’s not just about scaling what we already do. It’s about building a business that can compete internationally, integrate into global supply chains, and deliver real value for patients and partners.”
It is a bold step, moving away from physical storefronts into entirely new terrain, but one he believes is not only logical, but necessary for the next phase of growth.
“If we want to go public — and we won’t do that in Malta — we have to play at an entirely different level,” he says.
For Fenech, the strategic logic is clear. Retail businesses typically trade at EBITDA multiples of five to seven. Technology companies, by contrast, can command multiples of 15 to 20.
“If you want to build an attractive proposition for investors, it has to be a growth story,” he says. “It can’t be about 30 brick-and-mortar stores on an island in the Mediterranean.”
With Brown’s 28th anniversary this May, Fenech sees the Oxygen platform not as a departure from the company’s origins, but as their logical continuation.
“This is what makes sense,” he says.
On February 24, the Private Equity Venture Capital Association is hosting a fireside chat between Alexander Fenech and Albert Alsina, a seasoned Private Equity professional who will share his playbook on transforming ambitious businesses into unicorn-scale success stories.
