With shares of Kansas City’s Cerner turned over, sale to Oracle will close Wednesday
.JPG "Cerner Corporation’s World Headquarters Campus has been located at 2800 Rock Creek Parkway in Kansas City.")
Software giant Oracle plans to formally close on its acquisition of Kansas City’s Cerner Corp. on Wednesday, putting an end to local control of the region’s largest private employer.
Austin-based Oracle finalized a stock tender offer on Monday with 69.2 percent of all Cerner shares being tendered to the acquiring company.
Though Oracle has aggressively acquired other firms, its $28.3 billion purchase of Cerner is its largest ever. The purchase allows Oracle to enter the lucrative healthcare space with an already well established business.
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, board chairman and chief technology officer, will outline the company’s strategy for entering the healthcare market at a virtual event on Thursday.
In an all-cash merger agreement reached in late December, Oracle agreed to pay $95 per Cerner share, a premium over the approximate $80 price that the stock was trading at before news of the merger broke.
While mergers nearly always result in job cuts as companies cut redundant functions, Oracle has pledged to grow its presence of jobs in Kansas City once the sale is complete. Within Oracle, Cerner will continue as a dedicated subsidiary focused on its software products that serve hospitals, clinics and doctors offices around the globe.
Analysts believe that bodes well for the future of Cener’s employees, particularly since their work doesn’t directly compete with that of Oracle or any of its various software subsidiaries.
Cerner had been the subject of takeover speculation for years. Throwing off hundreds of millions in profits, the company has decades of experience building and managing the technological backbones of hospitals and clinics.
Some of the biggest tech companies in the world like Amazon, Google and Apple have expressed growing interest in the lucrative world of healthcare. All had been mentioned as potential buyers of Cerner.
Cerner’s 2021 hiring of former Google executive David Feinberg, who started in October as Cerner’s new chief executive, only fueled takeover speculation.
The acquisition by Oracle means the ultimate control of Cerner no longer belongs to those in Kansas City.
The idea for Cerner came about as founders Neal Patterson, Paul Gorup and Cliff Illig sat around a picnic table in Kansas City’s Loose Park in 1979. The firm went public by 1982 and hired its 1,000th employee in 1994.
Those numbers ballooned over the years with Cerner hiring more employees to fill its multiple campuses across Kansas City.
Even after multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years, Cerner employs some 13,000 workers in the Kansas City area. Its local workforce is topped only by the federal government and Children’s Mercy hospital, according to the Kansas City Economic Development Corporation. The region’s next largest private employer is Honeywell with about 5,000 workers.
This story was originally published June 7, 2022 at 10:24 AM.
