IAC Inc. (IAC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. I think in the interest of time, we're going to keep moving along. I think we've got -- I don't know if we can close that. But it's my pleasure to have the team from IAC as well here at the conference this year. They've been here now for a couple of years in a row. We always appreciate when they make the time to come. Christopher Halpin, CFO. Before we get kicked off, I am going to have to read a safe harbor. So before we begin, I'd like to note that our discussion may include forward-looking statements as defined under federal securities laws. These reflect the company's current views and expectations, but actual outcomes and results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties as described in its SEC filings, including the most recent Form 10-K and subsequent reports. We may also touch on certain non-GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA, which the company refers to as EBITDA for simplicity. You can find reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures in the company's earnings materials, SEC filings and on its Investor Relations website. Christopher Halpin is Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of IAC. Mr. Halpin leads Corporate Finance, Accounting, M&A, Investor Relations and Administration functions while also overseeing the day-to-day function and execution of IAC's businesses. So I got through it all. I tried to lay the groundwork for you.

I actually learned a few things in there.

I have a couple of jobs maybe you weren't on a lot. Well, Chris, look, I always appreciate the opportunity to talk. IAC has been on quite a transformation over the last 12, 18 months. You did the Angi spin-off that was completed in March. For investors getting reacquainted with the businesses and the assets that sit under the IAC umbrella, maybe you'd just like to level set that to kick us off.

Certainly, and thank you for having us. So we are a holding company. Right now, we have 5 consolidated businesses. Our largest People Inc., the recently rebranded Dotdash Meredith, Care, Vivian our -- we'll talk about Care.com today. Vivian, our health care staffing marketplace, our Search business and then The Daily Beast. And then we have 2 large minority stakes that we consider strategic, our 24% stake in MGM Resorts and our 32% stake in Turo, the leading car sharing business. We have right now about $830 million of cash at parent, no debt at parent and full flexibility to use that cash. And we believe we trade at a significant discount to fair market value, something we'll talk a lot about today. We are -- when you look at the value of our large MGM stake, which is publicly traded, our cash balance at corporate, and then the value of our private holdings. We think there's tremendous value to unlock and something that we are focused on through execution, through capital allocation and through catalysts, all of which we'll discuss today to unlock and drive that value.

Yes. I want to stick on this theme of capital allocation. Probably the first part of every shareholder letter I go to every quarter. Talk to me a little bit about the balance between potentially returning capital to shareholders and the M&A environment you find yourself in and where there might be opportunistic sort of shots on goal, when you think about M&A as a use of capital versus just returning capital to shareholders?

Yes. It's a very fair and common question from shareholders. If you go back a year or so, we were not buying back shares in 2024. We said we were looking to maintain cash for M&A. Number of investors very fairly asked, can't you walk and chew gum at the same time? You can do both. You've also got a number of different avenues to raise additional cash, if you wanted to. If you chose to buy back shares, reduce your corporate cash balance, there are a number of channels you could go down through your assets to raise more cash to do M&A, you can do both. Our Chairman, Barry Diller, said earlier this year that buybacks were back on the table. We bought back $200 million in the February to April timeframe, about 4.5% of the company and about 4.5 million shares. And the question we get is why did you stop? And people were disappointed. We didn't. It was simple as the message was buyback $200 million. That was our approval. We bought it back. Now let's look at -- see if there's M&A opportunities and analyze that. Since Q2 earnings, we have been buying stock. And that is something that we will continue to look at as we go. Barry, does not want to be predictable. We get this question a lot. Why don't you buy X percent constantly? That's not in the IAC DNA. That will aggravate investors or so on. But we do see value in our shares. We have bought back since the Q2 earnings calls, and we'll continue to analyze. On the M&A front, we're looking for interesting things that we think will create equity value. People ask us about size, profile, et cetera. It is hard to predict. We look at a variety of of different businesses size, scale. But it is one where it has to be something that will add and generate equity value to the overall IAC story.

Maybe just following up on that, this conversation you and I have had on public earnings calls. Just the environment itself, public markets are at all-time highs. Private market valuations are quite elevated by almost any historical measure. How much of that is a gating factor? Because I've been around the company for a long time. You guys are very disciplined buyers. You're very driven by ROI. How much does the environment act as the headwind to deploying capital into M&A?

It definitely factors in. And for any private transaction to happen, you need price discovery and agreement between buyer and seller or company and investor. You're in this world of ARR multiples and the like, where an enterprise SaaS framework is increasingly applied across a variety of other segments, which may or may not be applicable, but that's where we are. We are, at the end of the day, I don't want to say cash flow buyers, but because we'll buy things that may not be producing cash flow, but where you have clear line of sight to economics and cash flow generation. That is in our DNA. I think that's why IAC has been very successful at investing in digital and looking through certain dynamics to seeing underlying cash flow economics. On the flip side, for all the froth and momentum right now, there is probably an overemphasis on AI and core AI theme. So there may be opportunities in other segments. That's part of our thesis, things that are out of favor. And again, we're not looking for 20 investments. We're not a VC fund. We're not looking to build up a huge presence. We're looking for a couple of good ideas as Barry Diller would say, and that's what we're focused on.

Okay. Understood. You referenced earlier the decision to re-brand Dotdash Meredith to People Inc. Talk a little bit about the strategy behind that re-brand and how the team there, along with the team at IAC sort of think about the element of that re-brand sort of repositioning the company in the broader media landscape?

Sure. The name Dotdash Meredith was inherently kludgy. We've all gotten used to saying it. But if you say the phrase Dotdash Meredith to people not in this room, not in this industry, it could be an accounting firm or a consulting firm or something. And there was a real focus on -- we believe -- Neil and team have built an incredibly differentiated -- what we believe is industry leader, across content, across digital and across, we think, ad technology that -- we had a desire to build out the branding and presence of the enterprise. And the brand People has been tremendously strong for decades. It has really been revitalized since the merger of Dotdash and Meredith. It's extremely strong, is doing really well across platform and has a number of incremental growth vectors, that management is driving. We also like the concept in this AI era of people creating content for people, lower case p, that it is humans who are experts, who actually do the work, who are -- who know everyone in Hollywood, who have done the travel, et cetera, creating premium content for readers and we'll use technology and AI and others where it makes sense, but it is true premium content. And for all those reasons, it was clear that People brand made sense for the company.

Understood. One of the big topics going into and out of the last earnings release, and it's been a topic now for a number of months has been, how the broader search environment is shifting and changing and some elements of how AI have changed dynamics around traffic? And you've also presented some information on the earnings call about traffic diversification and some of the misconceptions around Search. Talk a little bit about what your key learnings have been about how your Search business is positioned relative to the narratives in the marketplace and how we should be thinking about that beyond just the current quarter, but over the medium to longterm?

Certainly. And we sought to provide incremental information and furnish the market with incremental insight last quarter, as there's so much agita around the outlook for Google Search and what's going to happen for all those who get traffic out of it, be it AI overviews or other things where they're cluttering the search page. Take a step back, when we combined Meredith and Dotdash, Neil said about 65% of total traffic on platform sessions is the metric we described came from Google Search. That, over time, we have seen -- we wanted to reduce that dependence as we saw ChatGPT come along. And also an underrated dynamic was the really jamming of Reddit into the search page in '23, which was very disruptive to the Google Search experience. Neil and team have been actively working to diversify our traffic away from Google Search and also Facebook, which I think at the time of acquisition was about 13% of traffic, is minor now, because they put the gates up so much in the '23 period, but also to build the direct relationships with consumers, direct NAV traffic, e-mail and other channels. And then another factor we've seen is the growth in the aggregator platforms, be they Apple News, which isn't captured in our sessions, but in our off-platform views, but also Google Discover, Newsbreak, et cetera. And so in the disclosure we had, you can see the decline in using second quarter numbers, Google Search is a source of our sessions from the 50s down to 28% last quarter. And People Inc. has really filled that hole with other channels. And then the other layer we added in was Sessions generate 64% last quarter of our Digital revenue entirely. So if you do that math, about 18% of our total Digital revenue comes from Google Search. Now we expect that to continue to decline as whatever disruptions happen with AI overviews. We think it's going to be asymptotic to something because the idea that there'd be zero traffic means it's probably no Google SEM business, which we wouldn't expect. But put that aside, we expect to continue to fill and drive Sessions away from Google Search. We also talked about off-platform views that we were driving. And we view that as a tremendous avenue of growth across Apple News, which has been a great partner. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere, where our brand, our content and our technology drives engagement on these third-party platforms, where it happens there, but we can monetize through different channels. We talked about rapid growth there. And those two factors, combined with our strong performance marketing as well as the D/Cipher+ product that we can talk about, are why we view ourselves as able to grow and drive value in Digital going forward despite the disruptions in Google Search.

Okay. I want to stick with this theme. I do want to come back to the Digital growth more broadly. But -- so we're reorienting where you get traffic for your media properties. One of the questions I typically get from investors is how to think about the end state of what that means for growth in traffic and what it means for margin profile for the business over the longterm as well?

Yes. And the margin profile of on-platform and off-platform is different. We've said on-platform -- if you look back at '24, our overall consolidated Digital EBITDA margin was about 28%. We would view fully loaded on-platform margins in the 50% range. We would view off-platform and things like D/Cipher+ as neutral to accretive -- slightly accretive to that 28% digital EBITDA margin. So we can keep profitably adding impressions and engagement through this off-platform strategy. We had a tough quarter for incremental margins last quarter, and we're going to continue to work to get back to those incremental margins because of the investments we're making in things like D/Cipher+, People App, et cetera, but we feel good about the ability to maintain and tweak up over time our Digital EBITDA margins.

So basically, let me build off of Digital EBITDA and build it back to Digital revenue, that was an area of strength in the most recent quarter. Talk a little bit about the building blocks of sustaining elevated levels of Digital advertising growth. How much of it comes down to the assets you built and acquired to drive that growth? And how much of it comes down to elements of brand advertising spend versus performance marketing spend across those channels?

Yes. So if you look at our full Digital revenue picture, about 62% plus/minus comes from Digital Advertising. And within that is premium and algorithmic. About 25% comes from performance marketing. That's predominantly where we have affiliate relationships. We can drive traffic and engagement from our sites and also from third-party properties like Apple News to our e-commerce partners where there's exceptional intent and we're paid in an affiliate model based on purchases there. We're a very large partner with Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair, et cetera. We also do some services like insurance and others, but that's been declining. But performance marketing, we think we're a real industry leader. And then low to mid-teens percent of that revenue comes from licensing. We do view growth across all 3 of those. To drive growth in digital advertising. We want to maintain on-platform traffic ideally flat. We'll talk more about what we're seeing right now in a second, but maintain those Sessions, drive enhanced monetization of those sessions through D/Cipher and continued ad performance and then also performance marketing, grow off-platform sessions on these platforms, drive monetization. We feel great about our premium direct sales force and what we're able to do there, be it on-platform, off-platform, D/Cipher+, our ability, our relationships with agencies and advertisers, drive performance marketing, continue to stay ahead of the curve in terms of integrations with Amazon and others and then grow licensing. And licensing shows up in rev shares from partners like Apple News. It shows up in AI licenses like our OpenAI license. It shows up in our partnership with Walmart, et cetera. And all of those are growth vectors. Talking about our current guidance, we guided last quarter to 7% to 9% Digital revenue growth for Q3 and 7% to 10% for the year. We also guided to 25% to 28% Digital adjusted EBITDA margins for Q3. We are reaffirming that guidance across all of those elements. What we would say is right now, we expected within that -- on the last call, we said we expected for O&O traffic to be down a little in Q3, up a little in Q4 and flattish for the second half. And then off-platform engagement as well as Performance Marketing and Licensing would overcome flattish on-platform sessions and drive growth. What we're seeing right now is the traffic picture -- on-platform traffic picture is choppier than they've -- Google has ramped up AI overviews. We now say probably high 50s percent frequency. Where we guide right now is on-session -- on-platform sessions down 4% to 6% in Q3, something similar like to that in Q4. But we feel good about hitting the 7% to 9% Digital revenue growth in Q3 and the full year 7% to 10% because of strength in off-platform, because of strength in Performance Marketing and continued momentum in Licensing. So we're working through it. It is -- there is -- there are some margin pressures with more coming from off-platform. We'll still be in that 25% to 28% in Q3 for Digital adjusted EBITDA margin. We'll be at the lower end of that, with the growth we're having, we would hope to be, but just more traffic, more of the revenue is coming from off-platform. So we'd say lower end of that 25% to 28% digital EBITDA margin in Q3.

Super clear. Building on that and maybe turning to where we are from a macro standpoint, that was more elements of mix in traffic. You have a unique insight into the current state of the consumer across a lot of different businesses you have as well as the advertising landscape broadly. What's the snapshot as we come out of the middle part of this year with a couple of months to go on your current view of where the macro environment sits relative to your businesses?

Sure. We think about it in two ways that are linked. One is consumer behaviors and then also sort of corporate interpretation of consumer behaviors, and we'll talk about it more. Consumer behaviors, we've been talking for a bit about the dichotomy of high income versus low-income consumers. Let's just say, I don't know if there's a word, a [ tri-chotomy ] of low income, middle and high. Low income, unfortunately, it's tough for the society, but it is in really difficult shape. And you're seeing that in terms of -- that's been going on for a while. We have less exposure in our portfolio to the lower-end consumer, but it's tough. And you can see -- I think people have talked about it in Las Vegas and in across durable financial services, et cetera. High income is solid. Performance marketing, we've talked about, which is heavily, heavily commerce, is very strong at People Inc, and there was a solid Prime Day and has continued. It's a question of where that middle-income consumer goes, and that's just uncertainty around the outlook on rates, on inflation, on the job market. I would say you still see the differing performance at the two ends of the spectrum. And we hope it continues. Obviously, where we are, the holiday period is incredibly important. So one way or another, it's going to play out the rest of the year, and we're watching it closely. On the corporate side, you definitely see apprehension around hiring. At Care, we've seen companies tighten up on backup care around the edges of how much benefits they want to give and spend there. It's still a core benefit, and you expect more companies to provide it. But on the margin, companies are tightening up. In the advertising segments, we get that question a lot. We see solidity/strength in pharma, in tech. Tech was something that's been weak for a number of years, is solid right now. We've seen incremental softness or lower confidence in retail and beauty. Part of that is what are tariff impacts going to be? What's inventory going to look like? And then you've had the segments that have been weak for some time, such as food and beverage and home. So in some, there's always these patterns moving, especially because we're so strong in endemic -- certain endemic categories like finance, food, travel, pharma, et cetera. But we're watching it closely, and there's no key pattern. I don't think anybody has a crystal ball right now.

Okay. Understood. I wanted to turn quick hits now to some of the businesses and investments inside the IAC umbrella. Care.com has embarked on a sort of a turnaround effort. Efforts you can do there to give us a sense of where are we in getting Care as an asset where you want it to be over the medium to longterm and some of the things we should be watching for along that path?

Certainly. The Care is a business, IAC acquired it in 2020. Obviously, went through COVID. We knew when we bought it, there were major improvements that needed to occur. I think a lot of people in this room probably knew it as a public company. A number of those were made on the platform side, on the trust and safety side, but the product was never improved to where it needed to be. Now it had massive COVID tailwinds of return to work, people wanting to get out and the fish were sort of jumping into the boat. That overly flattered the state of the business. And as those tailwinds dissipated and in some ways, reversed into headwinds, it highlighted the core deficiencies in the product and the consumer experience. Brad Wilson, the CEO and his team, he came in about 2 years ago, have actively worked to get all of that where it is. We relaunched in June. And the Consumer business from a subscriber and retention perspective has been declining for essentially 8 to 9 straight quarters. We're now seeing the positive impacts of the improvements made in the product and also relaunching marketing and improving messaging. We're seeing direct NAV traffic increase for the first time in a while. We're seeing sign-ups increase. We're seeing subscriptions increase. Because it's a subscription revenue business, that takes time. And we're also actually seeing renewals and retention improve. But we look for that to show up in the total consumer revenue profile over the coming quarters. Still a lot of work to do, but we're at least second derivative positive, getting to stability and headed in the right direction.

Okay. Understood on that one. The other two we get a fair bit about is just how to think about the non-control stakes in the business. The sort of MGM and Turo. I would say, historically, those were atypical, but they've been more in this form inside IAC for a while now typically the historical pathway had been path to control at IAC, but this was a bit of a different approach over the last couple of years. Talk about having those types of assets in the mix and how they should be thought about by investors?

Sure. So MGM, Barry Diller, our Chairman, said a couple of quarters ago, is core along with People Inc. and foundational. We have 24%, the company has bought back around 42% of their shares outstanding since we invested in 2020. And we think it is highly undervalued. It is the leader in Las Vegas, incredible market position there. There's agita or concern around the macro near-term outlook. The MGM has talked about what they're seeing and and how they're positioned. We think you just have to get through the concern and get to the other side and Vegas will re-rate as that macro overhang dissipates. We've got strong regionals. They've got excellent international asset in China that's in Macau that's doing quite well in MGM China. And then the Digital has really been an underappreciated part of MGM. BetMGM, which is a 50-50 JV with Entain has really solidified itself as the #3 player in U.S. sports betting and iGaming and put out strong guidance in July. Interestingly enough, Entain went up significantly. MGM barely moved, even though we both own half and around the same market cap. So we think that will be an increasingly recognized valuable asset. And then also, you've got international -- you've got the international digital of MGM with the series of acquisitions they've done of LeoVegas and also our JV in Brazil. And over time, that will be recognized as a real driver. And then you've got the international projects in Osaka, Japan, which is obviously very long dated, to be the basically monopoly or sole player in a big gaming market there and then the Middle East. So we view that as highly undervalued, great management team, a number of avenues to drive greater value and something that will be recognized over time. Turo, we own about 32% there. Leader as of the last public S-1, they filed in Q3 of '24, just under $1 billion of revenue, cash flow breakeven and a real market leader. They are heads down executing on the market opportunity in front of them, to take share across rental car and other categories. It is a great product, great experience, Net Promoter Score, et cetera, and you're competing against good competitors to compete against in some ways. It is all about unaided awareness is just too low there, get more people into the funnel, have them experienced Turo, have them understand the use cases, drive the repeat rate and scale up. That business was growing extremely rapidly, slowed down a bit. ADRs -- rates there should be less of a headwind now that we've gotten past some of the pandemic froth and some competitor challenges that were out there. And they are heads down executing and getting back to strong growth and unit economics.

Okay. Understood on both. One of the consistent themes we've asked about at this conference is AI deployment broadly. When you think about the collection of businesses, and assets you're involved in? And how are you thinking about AI strategies for those businesses broadly versus deploying AI internally to drive productivity and efficiency gains?

And that's very much how we think about it. And we have discussions among -- we have summits across our CEOs, across our CTOs, and then also, we have -- we track AI integration. So internal-facing code development, product efforts, QA, HR, all of those, we track that. A few of our businesses, Vivian, is one which has integrated AI into their product development in a way that blows me away, including having agents constantly. Agentic AI just constantly use the product and make recommendations on best practices to improve it or where there's dead ends in the product. That's more continued optimization internal, workflows, et cetera. Externally, you've got a number of avenues. Clearly, as interactive voice continues to scale up, where you've got a large customer service element, there will be savings. And I'm a believer that it's going to sort of be the ATM machine versus bank teller, where once you've dealt with a high-quality -- wrong word, but omnicient interactive voice AI, you're not going to want to go back to the BPO call center person who's dealing with a highly structured screen and you've have that frustrating experience. We're exploring those across on-boarding, particularly for our marketplaces, Vivian has done this, Care is doing it. Others, dynamic, flexible on-boarding of providers, of customers is a way better experience than traditional static drop-down menus or BPO call center operators. Another one that is really neat, Vivian is using AI to drive fulfillment of jobs with nurses. And it's like a lot of good insights, which is they're obvious in retrospect after they happen. But the agentic AI can call the nurse whenever they want 24 hours a day versus the time -- sort of the business hours, that the BPO operators that we've been using were. And also, it is a much smoother experience for the nurse in terms of identifying, qualifying for a job or seeking a job to go back and forth. So we've seen conversion rates per call triple using AI over human operators. Now that's a specific use case, but we'll see more and more of it. At the end of the day, it is all about the executive champion in-house. Everyone can come up with any reason not to use AI or take the risk on integrating into their workflows. You need that CEO, CFO, CTO who are championing it and also testing it. But we've seen it -- some things don't work, but we've seen a lot of good applications already.

Okay. We only have about a minute left. Why don't you leave us on your final thoughts with respect to the key operating and strategic priorities for IAC looking out over the next 12 to 18 months?

We laid it out in our investor deck, but execute across our businesses, both wholly owned and our minority stakes. Drive revenue growth, drive free cash flow, maintain unit economics, continue to build our cash balance. Number two, capital allocation. That's both capital return. We've said we bought back some shares recently. We'll continue to look at it, reduce our share count with our cash balance and then also look at additive M&A that creates value. And then number three, catalysts. And we've said we will sell non-core assets, continue to look for opportunities to monetize and distill down our value in our non-core assets and other larger catalysts to unlock value and shrink our discount.

All right. We're going to leave it there. Chris, thanks so much for being part of the conference.

Thanks so much, Eric.

All right. Thanks, everybody.