Amazon is Buying One Medical. Here's What Investors Need to Know. - 7investing 7investing
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Amazon is Buying One Medical. Here’s What Investors Need to Know.

The Everything Store is making big moves into health care. See what its acquisition offers of One Medical will mean for investors.

July 21, 2022

It was some bittersweet news this morning when we heard that Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) was making an all-cash offer to acquire One Medical (Nasdaq: ONEM) for $18 per share.

One Medical is a three-time 7investing recommendation that we originally picked back in September 2020. We’ve loved the company’s laser-focus on modernizing primary care. Its approach has been to encourage patients and primary care doctors to continually interact through a Smartphone app in order to stay healthy and also prevent more serious conditions from developing down the road. It’s a proactive approach to health care — as opposed to our current system of ‘sick care’ — which was enabling a lower-cost, value-based modern system. It hasn’t been shy about playing by its own rules, paying doctors a fixed salary and discouraging them from conducting unnecessary tests to boost reimbursement volumes.

On the bright side, Amazon’s offer is a more than 76% premium to One Medical’s closing price yesterday of $10.19. The deep-pocketed Everything Store has shown an interest in health care since launching Amazon Care three years ago, where it offers both in-person and remote visits from its doctors and nurses nationwide. This seems to be a nature fit for One Medical’s own expanding footprint, which now covers 767,000 paying members in nearly two dozen geographical regions.

Yet we say ‘bittersweet’ because as investors, we believe One Medical left a lot of money on the table. Revenue was growing at triple-digital annually and its care margins were steadily improving. It was signing new health network partnerships across the country, with Duke’s health care network recently joining and with five more announcements coming in the near future. And beyond that, it’s reach was widening beyond corporate employees. The launch of One Medical Kids opened the door to pediatrics solution, while its acquisition of Iora Health would cover seniors and those on Medicare.

This is a company with a vision for a better future, though it’s taken patience and a long-term investing mindset to appreciate. The Bank o’ Bezos has $100 billion of cash in the bank and is gung-ho about building out its health care offering. The access to readily-available capital likely played a role in One Medical’s decision, saving it from the distractions of raising money through secondary issuances or debt offerings (which will only get more challenging in our rising-rate environment).

Assuming the deal goes through, One Medical shareholders would receive $18 in cash for each share of ONEM they previously held. We’ll close out the three One Medical positions on our 7investing scorecard, and we’ll even make our research reports available to the public once the transaction officially reaches its completion.

Today is an exciting day for One Medical shareholders and tomorrow will be equally exciting for Amazon’s Health Services. And it’s a huge step in improving the digital future of American health care.

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