Missouri’s Biggest Deals and Events, 1974-2024

To see it on a map, there’s little to suggest relevance or historical significance of the building at latitude: 39° 05’ 18.60” N, longitude: -94° 36’ 12.59” W. But in some ways, the building that Kansas City once knew as R. Crosby Kemper Arena represents the highs and lows of an entire state over the past 50 years. 

For one, it opened its doors in 1974, promising a renewed economic life to the West Bottoms area near Downtown. It immediately attained national significance by hosting the 1976 Republican National Convention, considered by some the seedling that would become the Reagan Revolution four years later. In 1979, Missouri weather intervened in a big way—as it would continue to do in the decades to come—by generating forces powerful enough to collapse the roof of the building. Thankfully, on a night when it was largely unoccupied.

Kemper recovered and regained its useful life for most of the next 35 years as a municipal attraction for statewide and national events and attractions. Now a privately owned entertainment complex, it has demonstrated some of the resiliency that defines business life in the state. 

But it’s just one plot point in a 50-year history of progress, setbacks and bounce-backs, of pivot points and inflection points, of mergers and acquisitions, of bankruptcies and expansions, of innovation and disruption that all tell the story of Missouri commerce.

Major transactions and events since 1974 have reshaped the state’s place in agribusiness, manufacturing, financial services, information technology, health care, hospitality/tourism, and now e-commerce, biosciences, data storage and logistics. Here are some of the biggest deals and events that have contributed to the state economy we enjoy today.

>>> 1974-1979

The same year the GOP was gathering in Kansas City, the Interior Department was working on another deal with major impact: Decades of land aggregation and federal discussions about the proper use of public lands led to the formal creation of the Mark Twain National Forest. By joining the previous Mark Twain and Clark national forests, the 3-million-acre final product stands as one of the 10 largest in the U.S., and it’s one of the top tourism attractions in the state, drawing nearly 900,000 visitors a year. 

The region took a major step toward becoming a player in the emerging world of information technology in 1979, just a few years after the development of the personal computer. That’s when Neal Patterson, Cliff Illig and Paul Gorup founded Cerner Corp., which would go public in 1986 and eventually attain a $27.8 billion market cap on its way to global prominence in health-care informatics.

>>> 1980-1989

It’s impossible to overstate the role that natural events play in Missouri’s business history—flooding on an incomprehensible scale, tornadoes and heat waves have inflicted tens of billions of dollars in property damage over the past half-century, claiming thousands of lives in the process. The human toll may have been the worst in the heat wave of 1980, which delivered nearly an entire summer’s worth of days with temperatures of more than 100 degrees. Hundreds died in the major urban areas of St. Louis and Kansas City, and by the time the heat broke, roughly one in every 1,000 residents in those cities had either been hospitalized for a heat-related illness, or were dead because of the heat.

From natural disaster to man-made: The July 1981 collapse of two suspended skywalks at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City killed 114 people immediately and crippled or injured more than 200 others. The cause was traced to a design flaw from an on-site change during construction. 

In purely transactional terms, the early ‘80s saw a major acquisition when Avon—yes, the cosmetics maker—acquired St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt, which made specialty pharmaceuticals, for $712 million (equivalent to $2.37 billion today). Mallinckrodt, founded in 1940, was one of the state’s oldest continuously operating companies and would later be spun off, living on today as an operating unit of an Irish conglomerate.

In 1983, the state’s fortunes picked up considerably in the vehicle manufacturing world, with General Motors establishing its Wentzville assembly plant. More than 40 years later, it sprawls across 440 acres, with 4.25 million square feet of buildings, employing 4,600 directly and thousands more among St. Louis-area suppliers.

In 1985, G.D. Searle & Co., known for making the sugar substitute NutraSweet, merged with St. Louis ag and chemical specialist Monsanto Co., a deal with an estimated value of $2.7 billion and a precursor of sweeping change coming in that sector. 

Speaking of looming change, 1986 would mark the death of The St. Louis Globe-Democrat after nearly 135 years in print. The newspaper world was just beginning to grasp the collapse of its business model as an advertising medium—and this was a full decade before Americans would gain personal access to another disrupter called the Internet.

About that same time, the St. Louis area summed up the will to bring new life to its historic Union Station. Though a comparatively modest investment—$150 million at the time—its 1985 reopening represented one of the biggest adaptive-use projects in the country. It breathed new life into the city’s commercial core with shops, a hotel, restaurants, meeting spaces, entertainment venues and recreation areas. 

Back across the state in 1985, a prominent Kansas City engineering company took a step toward becoming the global design/build firm it is today. That’s when Burns & McDonnell, having been re-acquired from Armco Steel, established itself among the nation’s most prominent employee-owned companies. The ESOP structure has since been adopted by some of the nation’s biggest construction and engineering companies.

Another transformative change was coming to the Kansas City region but with dark consequences. That came in 1987 with the collapse of the Kroh Brothers real estate development empire; the firm had been engaged in some of the region’s biggest development projects but eventually became the face of developmental overreach. When it went down, it was the biggest bankruptcy filing in Kansas City history.

More bad news came the following year with the sad ending of American Italian Pasta—a demise that one wag described as a “riches-to-rags story. The firm barely dodged bankruptcy but couldn’t stave it off completely. And when it went down, more than business fundamentals were involved, as the CEO ended up in prison. By 2010, though, the reorganized company was stable enough to command $1.2 billion in an acquisition by Ralcorp of St. Louis.

Another major acquisition closed out the decade in Kansas City when Dow Chemical agreed to buy 67 percent of Marion Labs in 1989. The deal that created Marion Merrell Dow carried a price tag estimated at $5.5 billion and earned hundreds of Marion employees instant status as millionaires. 

>>> 1990-1999

As a new decade was unfolding, an industry was literally disappearing right before our eyes with the permanent closing of the Kansas City Stockyards. Like the Kemper Arena facility in that same stretch of the city’s West Bottoms, the business model had been subjected to changes in market forces as well as natural forces. It took decades to recover from the loss of 17,000 cattle and hogs in a 1917 fire; then the stockyards never recovered from the 1951 flood that devastated the area, its slaughterhouses and associated businesses. The last animals were auctioned off in October 1991.

From agribusiness to financial services, the bad news for Missouri continued the following spring when the FDIC closed five banks held by parent First Exchange Corp. of Cape Girardeau. Combined, they had $356.4 million in assets, and First Exchange represented the biggest bank failure in the state’s history.

The greatest economic challenge of the decade would soon follow, the devastating Missouri and Mississippi River flooding of 1993. Across the central U.S., persistent heavy rains and thunderstorms savaged the land that drains to the meeting point of those two rivers, followed by a series of levee failures. Farms, ranches, homes and businesses stood no chance as water reached historic flood-stage levels, and it went down as the most costly non-tropical, inland flood the nation had ever witnessed. Even barge traffic on the rivers had to stop for two months; the economic impact on Missouri overall was estimated at $15 billion.

The year did produce two positive developments that still bear fruit: In April, O’Reilly Auto Parts of Springfield went public at $17.50 a share in an IPO that raised $40 million. Today? Those shares are worth roughly $ 1,125 each, and the company’s market cap is nearly $65.23 billion. 

Around that same time, the ground was beginning to shift under the health-care landscape. A major temblor hit when Barnes-Jewish Hospital merged with Christian Health Services to form BJC Health Systems. That created the nation’s first health-care system integrating academic and community hospitals serving a broad urban, suburban and rural area. The movement gained momentum a year later when Missouri Baptist Medical Center and St. Louis Children’s Hospital joined the system. And the aftershocks continue to this day, with this year’s merger of BJC Health and what is known as Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City.

A year later, the state’s health-care ecosystem in the state witnessed truly transformative change with the creation of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. American Century founder Jim Stowers Jr. and his wife, Virginia, were cancer survivors who donated the majority of their $2 billion in personal wealth to create the research center, immediately thrusting this region into the national life-sciences discussion.

Just a few years later, St. Louis joined the party in a big way with the launch of the Danforth Plant Science Center. Initially funded from the wealth generated by the St. Louis family that launched Purina Mills and Ralston Purina, it would become part of a bioscience triad that few states can boast for human health, plant health and animal health.

 In Kansas City, the mid-1990s saw divestiture and acquisition with national implications. First, a financial-services IT company originally formed by Kansas City Southern Railway was spun off as DST Systems, which would become a civic powerhouse leading various initiatives like the rehabilitation of Downtown KC’s Union Hill. 

Elsewhere in financial services, change came at the highest levels when the state’s biggest bank—Boatmen’s—sold to NationsBank Inc. in August 1996. Two furious weeks of negotiations with four suitors eventually ended with NationsBank, which later became Bank of America, holding the winning cards. 

That same year, the Oracle of Omaha reached into the Kansas City market—he would be back later for more companies—by picking up Helzberg Diamonds. The financial muscle of Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway furthered Helzberg’s efforts to become a national name among retail jewelers.

One of the biggest shake-ups in the aviation sector came in August 1997 when McDonnell Douglas of St. Louis merged with the Boeing Co. It was a continuation of consolidation that had seen Boeing snap up the defense units of Rockwell International in a $13 billion stock swap. Boeing was the surviving brand, but it didn’t abandon St. Louis, which became home to the defense aviation unit.

Crosstown consolidations were hitting the banking sector that year, as well: with the holding companies for the second and third-largest banks in the city, Mercantile and Centerre, joining forces in a deal worth about $672 million. Combined, the new entity would be among the 50 largest bank-holding companies in the U.S. With assets of more than $11.6 billion, the Mercantile name was retained for banking operations; trust company operations were branded under Centerre’s flag.

The new No. 3 in that market didn’t hold the title very long: Magna Group sold for $2.3 billion to Memphis-based Union Planters Group that same year. Rapid movement among the biggest banks in the St. Louis market helped relative newcomer Commerce Bank assert its place as the biggest locally-owned enterprise in St. Louis.

And that Mercantile brand from above? It wasn’t in place for long: Firstar Corp.—we know it today as U.S. Bank—came calling in 1999 with $10.6 billion worth of stock in hand to make the acquisition. Up to that point, Mercantile had more than 500 locations across the Midwest and $36 billion in assets.

Acquisition mania continued to play out when Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen announced he would lay out $4.5 billion for Charter Communications, a privately held St. Louis-based cable operator. He merged Charter’s 1.2 million customers in 19 states into Marcus Cable to create the seventh-largest cable operator in the U.S.

Before the decade ended, one more billion-dollar deal was in the works: The French company Framatome Connectors International paid $1.85 billion in cash to acquire Berg Electronics, at that point one of the world’s four largest suppliers of connector, socket, and cable assembly products.

>>> 2000-2009

A new decade picked up where the old one left off, with Jones Pharma of St. Louis fetching $3.4 billion in a stock purchase by King Pharmaceuticals of Bristol, Tenn., in 2000. King’s model was to acquire branded prescription drugs being released by larger companies and then resell them, so it needed Jones’ diversified portfolio of branded pharmaceutical products.

Another St. Louis venture, The Earthgrains Co., was appealing enough that Sara Lee dropped into town with a sackful of cash—$2.8 billion of it to make the buy. That deal alone quadrupled the dessert maker’s annual sales of bakery items and refrigerated dough.

One of the biggest names in aviation was grounded in 2001 when TWA filed for bankruptcy—for the third time—and ended up as part of American Airlines. TWA had long been headquartered in Kansas City, then moved to St. Louis for its final stand after a brief stint back east. The timing couldn’t have been worse, just ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks that year, and the brand was on its way out.

One of the more intriguing—and uplifting—stories of a local company going global was brought to us by VML, which had started as a Kansas City ad agency in 1992, focusing on a new marketing medium: digital. British conglomerate WPP, the world’s largest ad company, purchased VML. The way these things usually work means a headquarters relocation. But VML endured to merge with another WPP power, Young & Rubicam to create VMLY&R, then last year merged again with WPP’s Wunderman Thompson unit to come full circle with its own brand as VML. Headquarters? Kansas City, Mo. A win for KC and the state.

The year closed out with Swiss-based Nestlé dropping off a $10.3 billion bag of sweets to pick up one of the most venerable names in St. Louis business: Ralston Purina. That all-cash deal created Nestlé Purina PetCare, bringing into one fold the Purina Dog and Cat Chow brands with the Alpo, Friskies and Mighty Dog labels owned by Nestlé.

In 2002, the region’s agribusiness sector was rocked when Farmland Foods of Kansas City, the nation’s largest farm cooperative, filed for bankruptcy. While the Farmland brand lives on today with meat products at groceries, it’s now part of the Virginia-based Smithfield Foods empire.

Another blow to regional pride came in 2005, when Federated Department Stores, parent of Macy’s, went on a $17 billion shopping spree and returned home to Cincinnati with the long-time St. Louis retailer May Department Stores in hand. Discussions about a possible merger went back as far as 1988, with May as the proposed buyer, then resumed on a merger basis in 1999 and 2002, with no resolution. 

They were taking down the May stores logos in 1995 when another one had to come down, over at Busch Memorial Stadium. After more than 40 years as home to the city’s beloved Cardinals baseball team—and at various times, NFL Cardinals and Rams—it was demolished to make way for Busch Stadium III.

Perhaps having a new stadium in 2006 removed some of the sting that St. Louis residents experienced with the loss of the Ford Motor Co. assembly plant that same year. Nearly 1,500 employees (down from 2,300 a year earlier) had extra time on their hands for baseball when Ford pulled out of the market. The plant was demolished three years later.

A hometown financial services institution, A.G. Edwards, fetched nearly $7 billion in a sale to Wachovia Securities in 2007. That deal created the second-largest wealth-management firm in the U.S., with 15,000 advisers managing $1.1 trillion in client assets, an arrangement that lasted just a year before the 2008 financial crisis sank Wachovia, which ended up in the hands of Wells Fargo. 

The decade wrapped up with yet another vehicle-manufacturing setback for St. Louis when Chrysler filed for bankruptcy. That left 1,000 workers without jobs, but the site in Fenton would find new life as a logistics business park, capitalizing on a growing sector of the state’s economy.

Among a handful of deals for which the past half-century will be remembered must be the 2008 acquisition of Anheuser-Busch. The St. Louis brewer wasn’t just an institution in the Gateway City; it was a point of Missouri pride. The Belgian firm InBev poured out $52 billion—not the most ever for a Missouri company, but quite likely the most painful acquisition for those who considered the nation’s biggest brewer their own. 

>>> 2010-2019

For the state, there was good news and … terrible news as 2011 arrived. 

First came word that Leucadia National Corp. of New York had purchased a majority stake in National Beef Packing Co., one of the state’s biggest enterprises. That kept the company in American corporate hands until 2018 when Brazilian company Marfig slapped down $969 million for a 51 percent majority stake.

That same year, Ford announced that it would invest a whopping $1.1 billion to upgrade the Claycomo assembly plant in Kansas City, where it would add production of a new product—the Transit commercial van—to its existing line of F-150 pickups, shifting Escape production to Kentucky. 

The truly awful news that year arrived in May when an F-5 tornado took aim at Joplin and cut a half-mile-wide swath through the city’s southern reaches. It killed 158 people, injured 1,000 more and among the $2.8 billion in property damage, it claimed the biggest hospital in Joplin, St. John’s Regional Medical Center. 

As matters of civic pride go, being home to a major national headquarters is a chest-thumper. But in 2012, St. Louis lost bragging rights to Charter Communications, which recovered from a bankruptcy filing that was among the biggest in Missouri history, then relocated to Stamford, Conn. Three years later, Charter merged with Time Warner Cable, creating a $78.7 billion media monster.

Sigma-Aldrich of St. Louis, which produced laboratory chemicals, biologics and reagents, became part of the German conglomerate Merck in 2014. That came in an all-cash deal worth $17 billion, setting Merck up to bolster its North American presence and capitalize on fast-growing Asian markets. 

That same year, Springfield outdoor guru Johnny Morris consolidated his grip on America’s passion for celebrating nature: The founder of Bass Pro Shops dropped $5.5 billion to acquire one of his biggest competitors, Nebraska-based Cabela’s.

St. Louis did emerge with a big win in 2016 when the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency chose it as the new home for its headquarters and operations, a project with a price tag that eventually reached $2.5 billion, which city leaders lauded as “a victory for urban America.”

In September of 2018, another German giant, Bayer, followed Merck’s foray into Missouri with an even bigger check: It bought the troubled Monsanto enterprise for $66 billion in cash. It’s hard to overstate the role that Monsanto played as part of the St. Louis corporate crown, much like the Anheuser-Busch deal a decade earlier, this one stung.

On the energy front, 2018 produced the long-awaited, long-sought and long-delayed (by regulators) union of western Missouri’s Great Plains Energy and Kansas powerhouse Western Resources. The deal created Evergy, with a Kansas City-area customer base of nearly 1 million people.

On the acquisition front, health insurer Cigna swooped in with the biggest acquisition deal in the past 50 years. It dropped a cool $67.6 billion to buy one of the state’s true entrepreneurial success stories, Express Scripts Holding Corp. It would stand as the largest M&A deal in the country that year.

>>> 2020-2024

The final five years of this 50-year historical journey began with a bang: The $17.3 billion megamerger of Centene Corp. and WellCare Health Plans. That gave the St. Louis health insurer 24 million members in all 50 states.

The following year produced two major deals that redefined business in the Kansas City region, both within weeks of one another. First came word that Oracle Corp. would snap up health informatics giant Cerner, a $28.3 billion deal. Originally hailed as a win for the region, it quickly became evident that Oracle’s commitment would shift to Nashville as virtually all of Cerner’s physical assets—save for the Innovations Campus in south Kansas City—went on the market.

The other deal holds out more long-term hope for bolstering this region’s image in a red-hot sector—logistics and distribution. The union of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern Railways created a truly North American rail system that connects the Pacific to the Great Lakes (and via the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Atlantic) while also reaching deep into Central America to the Gulf Coast and central Pacific. Transaction value: $31 billion. 

In 2021, Nesco Holdings paid $1.48 billion to acquire Custom Truck One Source, a Kansas City company founded by members of the Ross family. The Custom Truck brand survived acquisition by a public company, and even the monogram was adopted for its listing on the New York Stock Exchange: CTOS.

In 2023, the regional position in aviation completely flipped with the opening of the single-terminal Kansas City International Airport. The new “front door” to Kansas City, long sought by a business community that chafed with the outdated predecessor facility, quickly had passenger levels that approached  and exceeded pre-pandemic numbers. It also was a powerful incentive for a massive, 3,300-acre logistics park development unveiled by Hunt Midwest last year—the biggest facility of its kind in the state.

As 2024 dawned, the state welcomed its biggest player in health-care, the merged BJC Health/Saint Luke’s Health System titan. It’s the first health system in Missouri that can claim state-wide reach for all 6.2 million residents. 

While BJC and Saint Luke’s got the most of the attention, Columbia-based University of Missouri Health Care and Jefferson City, Mo.-based Capital Region Medical Center completed their integration in January, with both health systems unified under the brand MU Health Care. 

Hospital collaborations continued with Liberty Hospital’s assumption into the cross-state University of Kansas Health System, a deal that required no exchange of capital or ownership, but promises to bring new lines of advanced care to the growing region north of Downtown Kansas City.