Sprawling healthcare company Cardinal Health (CAH -7.08%) reported its latest quarterly results and announced a sizable new acquisition Tuesday morning. The market didn’t take these news items well, however, and in late-session trading, it was pushing the company’s share price down by nearly 7%. The S&P 500 index, meanwhile, was bouncing higher with a more than 1% gain.

A nearly $2 billion move

Of the two pieces of news, that of the acquisition was clearly the more impactful. Cardinal Health announced that its The Specialty Alliance multiservices organization (MSO) platform has signed an agreement to acquire Solaris Health. The latter company was described by its acquirer as “the country’s leading urology MSO.”

Cardinal Health will pay roughly $1.9 billion in cash to Solaris’ owners (comprising a firm known as Lee Equity Partners and the company’s physician partners) to acquire around a 75% stake in the business. In the press release trumpeting the deal, Cardinal Health said that it would bolster the scale of urology within The Specialty Alliance.

The company said it would finance the acquisition with cash on hand plus new debt. It expects the deal to close by the end of this calendar year.

Separately, Cardinal Health reported its fiscal fourth quarter of 2025 results. Revenue was basically flat year over year at just under $60.2 billion. Non-GAAP (adjusted) net income, on the other hand, rose by 11% to hit $501 million, or $2.08 per share.

On average, analysts tracking the stock were modeling $60.9 billion on the top line yet only $2.03 per share for adjusted net income.

Flying higher with guidance

Cardinal Health also raised its profitability guidance for the entirety of fiscal 2026. The company is now forecasting that adjusted earnings per share will come in at $9.30 to $9.50; its previous estimate was $9.10 to $9.30. That $9.30 at the low end of the new range is 13% higher than the actual fiscal 2025 result.

The company did not provide revenue guidance.

Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The 7-Eleven parent company rejected an offer last year, but Couche-Tard, which runs the global Circle K chain, was still interested and tried to coax a deal with the Japanese chain known here as “conbini.”

In a letter dated July 16 and sent to the Seven & i board, Couche-Tard stressed it had made a good offer earlier this year in a proposal of 2,600 yen ($17.50) per ordinary share in cash, which it said represented a 47.6% premium to the stock price. The initial offer, made last year, was for 2,200 yen ($14.86) per share in cash.

In the letter, sent to media Thursday and signed by its two top executives, including founder Alain Bouchard, Couche-Tard expressed exasperation at the response it was getting from Seven & i despite repeated attempts at dialogue.

“We have been very patient and respectful throughout this process, beginning with our meeting on July 23, 2024,” the letter said.

“You have engaged in a calculated campaign of obfuscation and delay, to the great detriment of 7 & i and its shareholders. We believe this approach reinforces our concerns about your approach to governance. Based on this persistent lack of good faith engagement, we are withdrawing our proposal.”

Couche-Tard, which runs nearly 17,000 stores in more than 30 countries and territories, including the U.S., said the documents it got lacked key information, executives were no-shows at meetings, and the meetings it did have ended up being “readouts” of statements, not frank discussions.

Seven & i acknowledged the dropped offer Thursday and said it considered talks “in good faith and constructively.”

“We remain fully committed to our standalone value creation plan, which we have been pursing in parallel, and to unlocking the value of our businesses, including our North American convenience store business. Our plan is concrete and actionable,” it said in a statement.

Some analysts say Seven & i management has not fully leveraged the business’ global potential or delivered enough value to shareholders, and could use better marketing, although its bottom line is unlikely to be affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policies.

The 7-Eleven franchise, which spans more than 85,000 stores in Japan, the U.S. and Europe, has a new chief executive, Stephen Hayes Dacus, the first foreigner tapped to head 7-Eleven. Dacus, an American whose mother is Japanese, has promised a leaner business by focusing on the supply chain and tailoring shop offerings to various regions.

For the first quarter of this fiscal year, Seven & i reported a doubling in profits to 49 billion yen ($330 million), mainly due to previously announced sales of property and equipment at its Ito-Yokado Co. retail chain.

Quarterly sales held up, as a favorable exchange rate helped some overseas earnings, according to the Tokyo-based chain. The seemingly omnipresent 7-Eleven chain speckles the streets of Japan, offering everything from stationery items and rice balls to hot coffee and utility bill payments.

Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said it’s clear Apple is incapable of producing its own AI in-house, despite a company culture that strives to build superior products internally. In recent days, some of Apple’s top AI talent has also been poached by increasingly aggressive AI talent recruiter Meta, Bloomberg reported.

Meanwhile, competitors are increasingly outdoing the company.

“Apple is at a highway rest stop on a bench watching this 4th Industrial Revolution race go by at 100 miles an hour,” wrote Ives in a Wednesday note.

Apple did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.

Ives was more hopeful about Apple’s AI prospects in January, despite writing that the company was facing a “fork in the road” year on the technology. At the time, he highlighted Apple’s clearest advantage in the AI arms race: its existing base of 1.5 billion iPhones and 2.3 billion iOS devices used by people around the world. 

In his Wednesday note, Ives struck a more apprehensive tone, adding Apple still retained the advantage of its widespread devices and could eventually win the AI race, but that its “window is narrowing.” Apple’s most recent WWDC, its annual event for showcasing new tech, also “was a snoozer,” Ives wrote, and barely mentioned AI.

“Apple is way too behind and does not have the AI technology to compete. The clock has struck 12, they need to acquire Perplexity or risk getting further behind,” Ives told Fortune in an email.

Even if Apple has to pay around double what it is currently worth, it should acquire Perplexity, he wrote. The San Francisco-based startup, reportedly worth $14 billion, has made strides among AI enthusiasts for citing links to articles and other information when its AI responds to queries. Perplexity on Tuesday also launched Comet, an AI-based web browser, for select subscribers, in its latest effort to compete with tech giants Google and Microsoft. 

Yet, Tomasz Tunguz, the founder of Theory Ventures, which invests in early-stage enterprise AI startups, said acquiring Perplexity would come with myriad privacy considerations for Apple. The company is used to providing end-to-end encryption for products like iMessage and FaceTime, and would need to find a solution for how Perplexity would run, either locally or on a secure cloud architecture.

“They would need to have a lot of confidence they could build an architecture from end to end that had that privacy component,” Tunguz told Fortune.

Kevin Novak, founder and managing partner of early-stage AI investment firm Rackhouse Ventures, said it’s unclear whether a large acquisition would work for Apple. The company has tried to maintain the pro-building ethos of Steve Jobs for much of its history, and has been shy to acquire. Among its largest acquisitions was its $3 billion purchase of Beats electronics in 2014.

“This would be challenging for any company, but especially given Apple’s sort-of corporate ethos around perfectionism, may be especially challenging for Apple,” Novak told Fortune.

Still, Ives, for his part, said he believes Perplexity could be a natural fit for Apple and could especially help level up Siri to make it many people’s most frequent exposure to AI. 

“If Apple acquires Perplexity, the combined forces of Cupertino with Perplexity would be a game changer on the AI front and rival ChatGPT given the scale and scope of Apple’s ecosystem,” wrote Ives in the note.