In what is an addition to the long list of acquisitions made this year, Oracle Corporation will be buying healthcare records systems provider Cerner Corporation through an all-cash tender offer for $95.00 per share, approximately $28.3 billion in equity value. The two companies have reached an agreement for the acquisition.
This acquisition is the biggest one made by Oracle to date (eclipsing its acquisition of PeopleSoft back in 2004) and will strengthen its cloud computing and database businesses. The deal is expected to close in the calendar year 2022. After the transaction, Cerner will be organized as a dedicated Industry Business Unit within Oracle.
“We expect this acquisition to be immediately accretive to Oracle’s earnings on a non-GAAP basis in the first full fiscal year after closing—and contribute substantially more to earnings in the second fiscal year and thereafter,” said Safra Catz, CEO, Oracle. “Healthcare is the largest and most important vertical market in the world—$3.8 trillion last year in the United States alone. Oracle’s revenue growth rate has already been increasing this year—Cerner will be a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come as we expand its business into many more countries throughout the world. That’s exactly the growth strategy we adopted when we bought NetSuite—except the Cerner revenue opportunity is even larger.”
Cerner, with 42 years of experience in the healthcare IT industry under its belt, is a suitable acquisition for software maker Oracle – Cerner’s largest business and most vital clinical system already run on the Oracle database. The acquisition will also enable the modernization of Cerner’s systems using Oracle’s technologies and strengthen the software maker’s venture into the growing healthcare segment– data by IDC says that the sector is expected to spend $15.8 billion on cloud infrastructure and software by 2023.
Cerner is known to provide health information technologies, ranging from medical devices to electronic health records (EHR) to hardware, and is used by hospitals and health systems so that medical professionals can deliver better healthcare to individual patients and communities. The company clocked $5.51 billion in revenue last year, and its sales are projected to rise by 5% to $5.8 billion this year.
Oracle is no pushover as well – providing numerous software products and services like Java, as well as cloud-engineering services and systems and database management systems. It had once been the largest database management company in the world but has fallen behind others such as Amazon and Microsoft when it comes to cloud computing.
