Oracle Corporation and Cerner Corporation on Monday jointly announced an agreement for Oracle to acquire Cerner through a full tender offer for $95.00 per share, or approximately $28.3 billion in equity value.
With this deal, Oracle is positioning itself significantly in the healthcare sector, a growing market, and potentially boosting Oracle’s fledgling cloud infrastructure business, which, according to Synergy Research, is showing dismal single-digit performance.
“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,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said in a statement.
Technology giant Microsoft made a similar move into healthcare earlier this year when it announced its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance Communications in a deal that is now under intense scrutiny by British regulators. It will be interesting to see if Oracle will encounter the same regulatory headwinds early next year.
This announcement is the first step in formalizing the acquisition and will be followed by an official filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.