CVS Well being Corp. is investing in a younger chain of well being clinics, and could also be trying to purchase one other.
CVS
CVS,
invested $100 million in a Carbon Well being Inc., a San Francisco-based chain of urgent- and primary-care clinics, in keeping with a Monday morning announcement. Simply hours later, Bloomberg News reported that CVS was in negotiations to purchase Oak Avenue Well being Inc.
OSH,
a decade-old chain of clinics that service Medicare recipients, for greater than $10 billion.
Publicly-traded Oak Avenue ended the day with a market capitalization barely decrease than $5.5 billion. Oak Avenue shares jumped greater than 35% in after-hours buying and selling, whereas CVS inventory was principally secure. CVS declined touch upon the Oak Avenue report, and declined additional touch upon the Carbon Well being funding.
CVS has spent years and billions of {dollars} to develop from a series of drugstores to a full-service healthcare firm, most notably with its buy of insurer Aetna in 2018. Late final yr, CVS reportedly outbid Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
and UnitedHealth Group Inc.
UNH,
to accumulate Signify Well being for $8 billion.
CVS was additionally reportedly taken with One Medical, a series of primary-care clinics, earlier than Amazon agreed to purchase its parent company, 1Life Healthcare Inc.
ONEM,
for practically $4 billion final yr. Now, it seems to be betting on different equally younger chains of healthcare clinics.
Carbon Well being is a seven-year-old startup that accepted $100 million in funding from CVS Well being Ventures, a part of a Collection D spherical of funding. The funding was introduced only one enterprise day after Chief Executive Eren Bali detailed more than 200 layoffs at the company, explaining Friday on Twitter that Carbon Well being was “unwinding main initiatives like public well being, RPM, {hardware}, power care applications to deal with our core main care & pressing care service.”
CVS’s funding in Carbon Well being will fund new areas of its primary- and urgent-care clinics throughout the U.S., Bali stated in a information launch Monday morning. The corporate has 125 clinics unfold throughout 13 states at the moment, in keeping with the announcement.
Oak Avenue is about three years older and barely bigger, with greater than 160 healthcare facilities throughout 21 states. The corporate went public in August 2020 at $21 a share and was value greater than $15 billion at its 2021 peak.
Oak Avenue shares have declined 11.4% prior to now 12 months, as CVS inventory has dropped 12.2% and the S&P 500 index
SPX,
has fallen 16.8%.