Kansas City’s Cerner cracks Fortune 500 for first time — only two KC firms made the list
North Kansas City-based Cerner Corp., the region’s largest private employer, has cracked the Fortune 500 list for the first time in its 40-year history.
The health care IT company ranked at 498 on the financial magazine’s 2020 list of the nation’s largest companies by revenue.
Cerner reported about $5.7 billion in revenues last year, up from about $5.4 billion in 2018.
The publicly traded company employs some 14,000 workers across several campuses in the Kansas City metro area. It counts some 28,000 employees globally.
Cerner landed on Fortune’s list at a time of major change for the company.
It originally pioneered the work of digitizing the nation’s paper health records. But the domestic market has largely completed that task, and Cerner and its competitors have saturated the market.
Last year, Cerner lost market share for the first time, losing ground to its primary competitor, Epic, according to a report from KLAS Research. Epic touts 29% of the U.S. hospital market for electronic health records, with Cerner holding 26%.
In recent months, Cerner has looked for ways to diversify its business model as executives worked with third-party consultants in an exhaustive review of all current operations.
Last year, executives cut several hundred jobs as they worked on wider plans to reduce expenses by $200 million. Still, the firm said it hired several thousand new employees last year and continues to recruit and hire even during the coronavirus pandemic.
Fortune 500 ranks companies by total revenues. It only includes companies incorporated in the U.S. that file financial statements with a government agency.
The only other local company on this year’s list is Seaboard Corp., a Merriam-based conglomerate with holdings in meat processing, shipping services and energy production. With more than $6.8 billion in annual revenues, Seaboard ranked 444 on this year’s Fortune 500 list. It has made the list every year since 2011.
