From monopoly to private pharmacies : Buy-out and franchising: Finding the entrepreneur within the pharmacist

One of Sweden’s most well known monopolies is approaching its end, Apoteket AB. A re-regulation of a state owned monopoly is nothing new but it happens within an interesting trade. Since the government is in total control of the whole re-regulation process, we found it interesting to see how they managed to include the potential individuals who want to take over a pharmacy. After all, many are the times the government has emphasized the importance of small firms. Out of the approximately 900 pharmacies owned by Apoteket AB, 150 are going to be sold to individuals. This group is called “small enterprise cluster”, and this cluster became the focus of our thesis. We wanted to get an insight into this group, since it is more complex and diverse compared to the large corporations entering the market. Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to measure the willingness to take over pharmacies among the employees of Apoteket AB, as well as to analyse how the government's support has affected the decisions of individuals. Method In order to get a good view of the re-regulation process we chose a qualitative approach, where we performed personal interviews with 6 respondents equally spread out on 3 pharmacies in a medium sized Swedish city and the surrounding area. The interviews where performed in a semi-structured manner. Besides the primary data, secondary data was collected. It builds the foundation for the theoretical framework and the analysis of the interviews. Since the theoretical framework was created before the research was performed, the study used a deductive research approach