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Investing.com – Oracle stock (NYSE:ORCL) traded 4% lower in Friday’s premarket on reports of the company pursuing its biggest acquisition yet to push deeper into healthcare.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the enterprise software company could pay as much as $30 billion to buy Cerner (NASDAQ:CERN), an electronic-medical-records company that had revenue of $4.3 billion in the nine months ending September 30 and a market value of nearly $24 billion as of Thursday. Cerner stock soared 19% premarket.
Healthcare already has a key presence in Oracle’s current revenue stream. The company offering technology to help insurers, care providers and public health systems parse data for better patient outcomes.
The acquisition is expected to help Oracle’s pivot to the Cloud, a move the company was initially relatively slow to embrace. Its strategy has become more aggressive in the last year.
In a post-Covid world, healthcare has become a go-to industry for tech companies to tap new areas of growth. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) itself has struck a $16-billion deal to buy Nuance Communications (NASDAQ:NUAN), a provider of clinical speech recognition software, medical transcription and medical imaging. That deal awaits regulatory approval.
