On the first day as a merged company, AmSurg and Envision Healthcare will join the prestigious S&P 500.
With a market capitalization of about $10 billion, the newly minted Envision Healthcare Corp. on Thursday will replace Legg Mason on the index as part of the healthcare category, according to a release from the S&P Dow Jones.
Shareholders cleared the way for the companies' all-stock merger when, on Monday, they overwhelmingly approved a deal to create the nation's largest physician-staffing company with annual revenue of about $8.5 billion.
That now dwarfs the previously largest physician-staffing company, TeamHealth of Knoxville, Tenn., with annualized sales of about $4.5 billion. Private-equity giant Blackstone Group is buying TeamHealth for about $6.1 billion.
As a member of the S&P 500, Envision of Greenwood Village, Colo., will enjoy greater visibility with big institutional investors, said Bob Kneeley, the company's vice president of investor relations. They tend to be very stable shareholders looking for long-term returns.
Envision's shares also will be included in large-cap exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that are marketable securities pegged to an index, said S&P 500 spokesman Luke Shane.
Only companies with a market capitalization of at least $5.3 billion are eligible to be included in the S&P 500. Those below would be considered either mid-cap or small-cap stocks.
Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare fell out of the S&P 500 in April after the hospital chain suffered a precipitous drop in share price over the previous nine months. It is now indexed on the S&P Midcap 400, which is the index from which Nashville-based AmSurg is graduating with its merger.
