villainx Posted August 17, 2020 Share Posted August 17, 2020 It comes out a little closer. Plus there's always a discount for these type of holding companies. But there's also a track record. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xerxes Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 just in case .... Casinos Roll Dice On Online Gambling - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/casinos-investors-place-bigger-bets-on-gamblers-playing-from-home-11597597200 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gordon Gecko Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 From earning press release As of June 30, 2020: IAC had 85.1 million common and Class B common shares outstanding. On a consolidated basis, including approximately $1.4 billion from the sale of Class M shares that were received by IAC in early July, the Company had $4.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents, short-term investments and marketable securities, of which IAC held $3.9 billion and ANGI Homeservices held $421.0 million. On a consolidated basis, the Company had $240.6 million in long-term debt, all of which was held at ANGI Homeservices. IAC’s economic interest in ANGI Homeservices was 85.1% and IAC’s voting interest was 98.3%. IAC held 421.8 million shares of ANGI Homeservices. As of August 7, 2020, IAC had approximately $2.9 billion of cash and cash equivalents, short-term investments and marketable debt securities, excluding cash held at ANGI Homeservices and excluding 59 million shares of MGM Resorts International. OK. Thanks. You are right then. 10Q is weird then - where the heck they had the class M shares (or cash equivalents) on it... ::) Anyway, does not matter. Thanks for digging it up. I'll adjust above. Still decent value. Turo, blue crew, nursefly, and Care.com cost is ~$780mm. Unless Vimeo et al swan dive, there's a few billion in that stub. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sagiv131 Posted August 18, 2020 Share Posted August 18, 2020 Vimeo $1.5-$2B today easily Dotdash $400m on performance marketing segment this year @20x EBITDA and maybe another $200-300m for the rest, probably $1+B business easily in 2 years on performance marketing alone (FUTR on LSE for comps). Should be valued way higher if it keeps growing 100% yoy Search + Mosaic $500m-$1b combined depending on recovery (5x ebitda). Mosaic probably has more juice All other bets >$1b, Care.com will take a bunch of cash to get growing but watch for that one to take off. ANGI new initiatives also very impressive especially on the payments end, I assume long term beneficiary of covid with that. IAC should be $15+B market cap today and for some reason they keep getting discounted when they have the cash and the leadership to actually grow and monetize their high growth bets/units and they'll eventually spin them out. Easy to own though! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xerxes Posted August 30, 2020 Share Posted August 30, 2020 Since MGM announcements, the investee has expanded its board of director to include Diller and Joey and this past week sadly furloughs at MGM became permanent. IAC though got a 25% unreleased gain in less than a month. Not that they are really looking at that. It bypasses the net income anyways going directly into its equity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xerxes Posted November 5, 2020 Share Posted November 5, 2020 IAC will spin off Vimeo. https://ir.iac.com/static-files/0fa63330-e107-4787-8748-664ec40cea61 I had bought in late summer, but my initial sizing didn't reach full size that i wanted. Already up 10% in after market. This is a case of a company using the current environment fully in its advantage. No empire building. If it makes sense we will do it, if not we will not do it. Cannot go wrong with the Diller/Joey team. "So, why consider a spin, and why now? Given Vimeo’s success, and investor adulation for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) category generally, we expect Vimeo’s access to capital inside of IAC will be much more expensive than access to capital outside of IAC, and that capital will be helpful to enable Vimeo to achieve its highest ambitions. We’ve always said we’re the anti- conglomerate, and we optimize for whatever allows our businesses to achieve their best chance of operating success. Right now, we believe Vimeo could benefit from having its own “native” equity currency in enterprise SaaS software, whether to finance R&D investment, recruit employees, or to make acquisitions. We just tested Vimeo’s ability to access capital with a small private fundraise to bolster Vimeo’s balance sheet and to repay capital to IAC. We entered into agreements today to raise $150 million of equity capital at Vimeo from outside investors at an implied enterprise value of $2.75 billion, a large multiple of current revenue." "We don’t normally think in terms of revenue multiples, but we found real appetite among investors who do – we had more interest in Vimeo than the number of shares we were willing to let Vimeo sell. So we’re now evaluating a full spin off to enable Vimeo with the complete suite of tools available in the public markets. There’s a long way to go before we’re decided on that, and far too early to speculate on what the terms of that spin would look like – but as always we’ll be guided by our long-held principle of doing what’s in the best, long-term interests of our businesses and our shareholders." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
valueventures Posted November 7, 2020 Share Posted November 7, 2020 Anyone honing in on ANGI after the big sell-off on Friday? Spree put out a nice write-up on IAC/ANGI in its Q3 letter: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4379280-spree-capital-advisers-q3-2020-letter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KJP Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 Anyone honing in on ANGI after the big sell-off on Friday? Spree put out a nice write-up on IAC/ANGI in its Q3 letter: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4379280-spree-capital-advisers-q3-2020-letter I follow it and own it through IAC. Here's another writeup about it: https://yetanothervalueblog.com/2020/10/a-flywheel-marketplace-at.html I think moving from pure lead gen/advertising to a blend of that and a fixed price/transactional platform is smart. I don't think a competing transactional platform exists, and I think building a competing one is going to be quite difficult. They've already rolled out payments, and I assume they'll start rolling out other high margin ancillary products on top of the transaction platform. More short term, the recent increase in demand (as evidenced by the surge in service requests) is very encouraging. I think they'll monetize that demand much better in the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Broeb22 Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 For whatever reason, I really struggle with the thesis of ANGI becoming a transactional platform. I just don’t see why good contractors who are so busy they can’t work fast enough are going to be on ANGI. There is almost adverse selection in the supply in the sense that if a contractor has excess capacity (I.e. time) right now they are either new or not very good. I also think there is an tech adoption barrier here that lessens with time as the current generation of contractors is generally not very tech savvy. They may all have cell phones but that does not mean they trust a “computer” to tell them how much a job should cost. I watched the ANGI CEO discuss what they’re doing on fixed price and it’s very cool and smart stuff, but I will be surprised if they can fully account for the vagaries of the changing physical world with a fixed price for even a significant minority of projects. I think a feature that allows the contractor to increase the price by documenting why might increase comfort among contractors (which is clearly where ANGI needs more momentum) while marginally negatively impacting comfort among buyers. Theoretically there are huge benefits to what ANGI is doing. If I’m Joe Contractor, and maybe I spend 25% of my time quoting business and I can move that to a level approaching 100%, then I’m making 33% more money. But, ANGI is commoditizing me and my pricing. A good contractor is worth more than a decent one but this makes no distinction so for the best contractors ANGI is likely to underprice the work even if the price is fair overall. There is admittedly some ignorance on my part on if the are already segmenting things like this. I will say from my experience with Thumbtack that they do not operate that way. I will also that I have used or tried to use Thumbtack for a variety of projects, and I only got decent response on the low-end jobs, specifically lawn mowing. The requests for plumbers, for retaining walls, for painting, for kitchen remodeling, all went basically unanswered (maybe 1 or 2 responses that ended up being not serious. These are just my thoughts based on thinking about the business and recent experience. The opportunity here is truly massive, and the valuation would be incredibly cheap if it works out, so I’m not saying it’s crazy to take a flyer on, but given the decreasing supply of contractors of all types the problems we’re having today aren’t getting any better in the medium term, this is not an outcome I would have a ton of conviction in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Broeb22 Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 Oh I forgot to add that where these two-sided internet transactional marketplaces have popped up are in industries (home stays, airlines, hotels, taxis, Upwork even, eBay) where at least initially the supply side had excess capacity and where there were generally strong incremental profits available. In the case of the gig work companies, the added incentive for supply was flexibility of when and where to work. eBay there was excess capacity in the sense that people had excess stuff that they needed an trustworthy efficient way to sell. How is ANGI going to significantly attract contractors on terms they find attractive enough to give up other business/leads they already have to get this new source of work? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spekulatius Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 Broeb22, I agree with your concern about lack of supply and then of course there is an issue with the complexity and fragmentation of services, making pricing very difficult. If they can crack the pricing code, this could become very attractive, but right now, I am not seeing a whole of evidence. There are similar business models using the subscription/insurance model like FTDR and even ORI has a sub, but while that model has appeal to the customer, the customer satisfaction with these models/services seem to be very poor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ratiman Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 I was just about to make the same argument as Broeb22 but he did it a lot better. Why would contractors want to become serfs on somebody else's plantation? They didn't go into contracting so they could become an employee or have all their income tracked by the IRS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KJP Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 Besides contractors not wanting to be commoditized, you're also dealing with hyper-local markets, so not as large of a network effect as something like AirBnb, and you're dealing with a supply side that may be able to disintermediate the platform for repeat business, e.g., even if you used fixed price once to buy a plumbing job, if the job is done right, you'll just contact that plumber directly for future plumbing work, rather than using the transactional platform. (This seems to be a real issue for another IAC offline-to-online play: Care.com -- childcare services are not a commodity in the sense that parents really care about the identity of the specific individual performing the service.) On the other hand, even if contractors don't want to be commoditized, they will eventually go where demand is. So, if HomeAdvisor service requests continue to grow, I believe supply will eventually come. Also, there seems to be a growing desire, particularly among the young, to have issues dealt with by click, rather than interacting with people (Carvana, OpenDoor). I think that view will only grow among homeowners as millenials become a bigger share of them. As for the lack of evidence thus far that fixed price is really gaining traction (or at least justifying the investment), I think that's right but not surprising given the challenges. You've got both local geographic (rather than transnational markets like AirBnb and Etsy) and a bunch of highly differentiated product markets within those local markets, which is a challenge that something like Uber doesn't have to deal with. So, to me, it's not surprising that building sufficient scale in something like 200,000 or so local product markets (geographic markets x product sub-markets) takes time. It's also those same characteristics that are going to be barriers to entry if HomeAdvisor's fixed-price platform is successful. Finally, ANGI is actually profitable and trades at around 4x sales, rather than 50x or 100x. So, while the valuation is quite high on current earnings, it's not is the same league as the real high flyers. Moreover, there appears to be no competition (yet!) from any other transactional platform. So, it is somewhat unique in that it's pursuing offline-to-online in a very big TAM with no competitors around to destroy unit economics a la Uber and Lyft. All that being said, I don't know whether HomeServices will ultimately succeed to not. That's why I prefer to own IAC, which has several other interesting businesses, a lot of cash, and people who really seem to know what they're doing at the helm. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jurgis Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 I pretty much agree with what people above posted about ANGI. I think I raised similar questions and issues when discussing ANGI. And, yeah, as KJP wrote, ANGI is valued rather cheaply compared to other platforms likely because they are not growing fast even this year where everyone and their dog are doing home improvement projects. My personal experience with ANGI has been subpar. I actually never registered, but I got some leads for work I needed to do. One of their very-highly-recommended contractors seemed very professional, but his quote was through the roof (pun intended). IMO, like people wrote in various home improvement threads on CoBF, if you manage to find a good/great contractor, you should try to keep them, wine and dine them, since finding another one is a pain. Edit: A bigger issue, which IMO ANGI does not resolve, is that if you need a specialized work once in X years (roofing, insulation, etc.), and you need to choose a contractor for that, it is very hard to choose someone who is good/great and has reasonable pricing. Reviews only go so far. And some of the highly recommended ones either are flaky (never show up for estimates, show up for estimate and never return estimate) or hugely overpriced and not necessarily high quality. I've had a plumber who is still top recommendation across a number of services who charged me $2K over the price that was later charged by another plumber for same work/parts. You can get 2-3+ quotes for non-urgent projects, but if your heating system is on the fritz, you cannot wait 2+ weeks to get multiple quotes. On the positive side, outside of ANGI, just through yellow pages and/or internet search, I've had great experiences with some specialized contractors (e.g. garage door replacement). So there are good ones out there, they are just not easy to find and identify. Disclosure: I have positions in ANGI and IAC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KJP Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 Edit: A bigger issue, which IMO ANGI does not resolve, is that if you need a specialized work once in X years (roofing, insulation, etc.), and you need to choose a contractor for that, it is very hard to choose someone who is good/great and has reasonable pricing. Reviews only go so far. And some of the highly recommended ones either are flaky (never show up for estimates, show up for estimate and never return estimate) or hugely overpriced and not necessarily high quality. I've had a plumber who is still top recommendation across a number of services who charged me $2K over the price that was later charged by another plumber for same work/parts. You can get 2-3+ quotes for non-urgent projects, but if your heating system is on the fritz, you cannot wait 2+ weeks to get multiple quotes. I think ANGI is trying to address this issue via fixed-price. Their pitch is that they will vet the contractor and guarantee the work. I think it's fair to be skeptical of that claim, but I think many people find it appealing, because they have little ability to vet contractors themselves. It's the same with used cars -- car people want to look at the car themselves because they can do their own evaluation; other people prefer to rely on some type of third-party inspection/guarantee (Carvana) because they know nothing about cars and thus cannot effectively evaluate the product themselves. They also fear being taken advantage of by a used car dealer, so prefer the online experience. And, of course, it's convenient to enter some information on a website have a solution show up at your door. ANGI's fixed-price offering is going after the same consumer mindset. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jurgis Posted November 8, 2020 Share Posted November 8, 2020 Edit: A bigger issue, which IMO ANGI does not resolve, is that if you need a specialized work once in X years (roofing, insulation, etc.), and you need to choose a contractor for that, it is very hard to choose someone who is good/great and has reasonable pricing. Reviews only go so far. And some of the highly recommended ones either are flaky (never show up for estimates, show up for estimate and never return estimate) or hugely overpriced and not necessarily high quality. I've had a plumber who is still top recommendation across a number of services who charged me $2K over the price that was later charged by another plumber for same work/parts. You can get 2-3+ quotes for non-urgent projects, but if your heating system is on the fritz, you cannot wait 2+ weeks to get multiple quotes. I think ANGI is trying to address this issue via fixed-price. They're pitch is that they will vet the contractor and guarantee the work. I think it's fair to be skeptical of that claim, but I think many people find it appealing, because they have little ability to vet contractors themselves. It's the same with used cars -- car people want to look at the car themselves because they can do their own evaluation; other people prefer to rely on some type of third-party inspection/guarantee (Carvana) because they know nothing about cars and thus cannot effectively evaluate the product themselves. They also fear being taken advantage of by a used car dealer, so prefer the online experience. And, of course, it's convenient to enter some information on a website have a solution show up at your door. ANGI's fixed-price offering is going after the same consumer mindset. OK. I have not seen their fixed price offerings yet. Might look at that. I think it's tough to fix-price the home improvement work. I've seen this offered by another company (I posted it here: https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/home-projects/msg391300/#msg391300 ) for door/window installation. It was fixed price for specific door/window models. I did not try it then though. It was below the quotes I got, but difficult to compare since I could not make the contractors to write the quotes with apples-to-apples comparison of parts. They tell you that they don't offer this specific model of door or they don't get back if you ask to adjust the quote for different door model. Anyway, yeah, fixed price is somewhat good and may work for certain jobs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Broeb22 Posted November 9, 2020 Share Posted November 9, 2020 Edit: A bigger issue, which IMO ANGI does not resolve, is that if you need a specialized work once in X years (roofing, insulation, etc.), and you need to choose a contractor for that, it is very hard to choose someone who is good/great and has reasonable pricing. Reviews only go so far. And some of the highly recommended ones either are flaky (never show up for estimates, show up for estimate and never return estimate) or hugely overpriced and not necessarily high quality. I've had a plumber who is still top recommendation across a number of services who charged me $2K over the price that was later charged by another plumber for same work/parts. You can get 2-3+ quotes for non-urgent projects, but if your heating system is on the fritz, you cannot wait 2+ weeks to get multiple quotes. I think ANGI is trying to address this issue via fixed-price. They're pitch is that they will vet the contractor and guarantee the work. I think it's fair to be skeptical of that claim, but I think many people find it appealing, because they have little ability to vet contractors themselves. It's the same with used cars -- car people want to look at the car themselves because they can do their own evaluation; other people prefer to rely on some type of third-party inspection/guarantee (Carvana) because they know nothing about cars and thus cannot effectively evaluate the product themselves. They also fear being taken advantage of by a used car dealer, so prefer the online experience. And, of course, it's convenient to enter some information on a website have a solution show up at your door. ANGI's fixed-price offering is going after the same consumer mindset. I agree that most new home owners probably prefer a DIFM as opposed to DIY when it comes to home repairs, so I agree that ANGI’s fixed price offering would go after that mindset. However, I can see a world where you can pay a fixed price per month to get a whole set of services completed (appliances repaired, gutters cleaned, leaks fixed, etc.) all through one monthly subscription. Wouldn’t that be a much superior option to having to big out every little thing you want done? And that model would be what Frontdoor and others do and are working on improving. The home warranty space has horrible reviews and my dad gave me an earful of bad stories when I told him I was even considering investing in a home warranty company. I think some of those problems can be remedied (one company my dad used just walked away from the policy and gave him the rest of his money back (prorated) instead of complete the repair.) I’m more optimistic that Rex Tibet’s has a model that can be leveraged long term than I am with ANGI but that’s just me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KJP Posted November 9, 2020 Share Posted November 9, 2020 This blog post from today talks about some of the issues we've been discussing in this thread: https://medium.com/breadcrumb/the-marketplace-monetization-map-complexity-and-asymmetry-529b70a830d7 Historically HomeServices was dealing with a "high complexity" service (each home repair job is somewhat unique, versus low complexity like a cab ride from point A to point B), so it monetized via a paywalled marketplace model (charging contractors for access to demand via lead generation, regardless of whether the lead generated an actual sale). Via fixed-price, HomeServices is trying to build a "managed marketplace" model that monetizes via commissions. As several people have mentioned, one issue ANGI may have is that, unlike Uber's supply side, HomeServices's supply side has other ways of acquiring customers and would prefer any channel that has lower customer acquisition costs than HomeServices' platform, such as word of mouth. And perhaps HomeServices's platform ultimately will end up with an adverse selection problem, as the contractors who can't fill up their schedule on their own may tend to be the ones that aren't very good. Given that supply is probably somewhat reluctant to use the platform, capturing demand appears to be very important. I suspect there may be opportunities to build demand from high-volume commercial customers, e.g., home warranty companies or insurers. They can also try to integrate into smart devices that generate alerts and offer the opportunity to book services on the platform, e.g., https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/29/google-nest-begins-testing-hvac-alerts-partners-with-handy-for-booking-service-calls/ (ANGI owns the Handy platform referred to in the article) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted December 7, 2020 Share Posted December 7, 2020 Google's not happy about IAC shenanigans: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-spars-with-barry-dillers-iac-on-misleading-marketing-practices-11607267157 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KJP Posted December 22, 2020 Share Posted December 22, 2020 Board has approved the Vimeo spin: https://www.iac.com/press-releases/iac-announces-plan-to-spin-off-vimeo-to-iac-shareholders?skip=-1 Proposed timeline is shareholder vote in Q1 2021 and, if approved (and I expect it would be) a tax-free spin in Q2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jurgis Posted December 22, 2020 Share Posted December 22, 2020 IAC up ~14% on Vimeo spinoff news. Was planning to swap (more) ANGI for IAC, coulda shoulda. Now I'm thinking of swapping IAC for ANGI (going the other direction). In other news: PropTech Acquisition Corporation (NASDAQ:PTAC) announced in an 8-K that its shareholders approved its combination with online home improvement marketplace Porch.com at a special meeting earlier today. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hasilp89 Posted January 1, 2021 Share Posted January 1, 2021 Turo CEO discusses 2021 ipo. No mention of iac ownership. https://www.wsj.com/articles/turo-ceo-says-car-renting-app-plans-to-go-public-in-2021-11609502400?st=ga7ydpf70dsqzu0&reflink=article_copyURL_share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hasilp89 Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 MGM looking at an online gaming business. https://www.wsj.com/articles/mgm-seeks-to-buy-ladbrokes-owner-entain-11609707600?st=ybonqflbx7jnjpm&reflink=article_copyURL_share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cameronfen Posted January 4, 2021 Share Posted January 4, 2021 MGM looking at an online gaming business. https://www.wsj.com/articles/mgm-seeks-to-buy-ladbrokes-owner-entain-11609707600?st=ybonqflbx7jnjpm&reflink=article_copyURL_share Thanks for this. I just got long Entain and I didn't realize this. I don't know if I'm lucky or not since I think Entain is a really good business with a long runway. Long IAC too but I guess I'll go even longer if they put in a good deal of the capital into the deal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xerxes Posted January 8, 2021 Share Posted January 8, 2021 https://www.fastcompany.com/90592458/exclusive-iac-acquires-umbrella-the-popular-household-help-service-for-senior-citizens Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now