A while back, I wrote about IAC/InterActiveCorp. (NASDAQ:IACI) and later vowed (half joking, of course, because look at me now) never to write about that company again. With all the businesses crammed under the IAC umbrella, I considered this to be a pretty convoluted company, where I'd rather look at the pieces instead of the whole. (Needless to say, I wouldn't have considered an investment in such a behemoth, either.) Well, word today is that things may become a little simpler very soon.
IAC plans to spin off the travel-oriented areas of its business into a publicly traded company, which will be known by the name of one of its most well-known brands, Expedia. It will encompass all the travel-related brand names owned by IAC, including Hotels.com and Hotwire, as well as lesser-known entities such as Activity World, Anyway.com, and TV Travel Shop.
IAC will encompass all the rest of the mishmash of the company's online properties -- its electronic retail and services segment -- such as Ticketmaster, LendingTree, Citysearch, Match.com, Home Shopping Network, and eVite.
As my Foolish colleague Bill Mann has written in the past, IAC has a reputation for being pretty darn complicated. Those names mentioned above are only the tip of the iceberg -- this has been a company where an investor could feel like he or she was about to get crushed by all the moving parts, seeing its tendency towards an aggressive growth-by-acquisition strategy.
This split-off of Expedia and the travel-related businesses should help in this regard. (However, allow me a moment of pettiness for how much I hate the name IAC.) Anyway, Expedia will go it alone, facing off against competitors such as Cendant's (NYSE:CD) Orbitz, Sabre Holdings' (NYSE:TSG) Travelocity, Priceline (NASDAQ:PCLN), and Travelzoo (NASDAQ:TZOO).
In the company's press announcement, Chairman and CEO Barry Diller's letter to shareholders stated, "This is entirely an elective... there is nothing else that pushed us, no transaction, no inherent worry that led us to take this course at this time." He also intimated that IAC's focus on travel businesses made it more difficult to grow through acquisitions, as some companies balked at accepting a "travel stock."
However, when a company says that there's nothing to worry about, it's hard not to wonder whether there is something to worry about. After all, Expedia is a relatively new member of IAC's portfolio of companies; it was purchased in March 2003 in a stock swap with a $3.3 billion price tag.
Faced with this quick turnaround of Expedia, any discerning investor would be perfectly justified in wondering whether maybe Expedia represents a failed acquisition -- or maybe an industry in which the future doesn't look as rosy as it once did. Given questions inherent in this sudden strategy change, today's pop in IAC's stock price seems a bit strange indeed.
For more coverage on InterActive, try these:
- InterActive and Permanent Tax, by Jeff Hwang
- InterActive Rebound, by Jeff Hwang
- InterActive Complications, by Bill Mann
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Alyce Lomax does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned.
