NEW YORK — Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp is completed its split into five publicly traded companies Thursday — a move intended to give each business more focus and value than the previously cluttered whole.
With the split, home-shopping network HSN Inc., time-share business Interval Leisure Group Inc., ticketing service Ticketmaster, and lending and real estate business Inc. began regular trading Thursday under their own ticker symbols. The symbols are “HSNI” for HSN, “IILG” for Interval, “TKTM” for Ticketmaster and “TREE” for .
The company’s remaining Internet properties, including search engine ., are staying under the IAC name and will trade for the next 20 days as “IACID,” because of Nasdaq rules. After that, IAC will regain its original “IACI” ticker symbol.
The spinoffs were a reversal of direction for the Internet conglomerate run by Diller.
IAC’s division into five parts was not simple, as a legal scuffle emerged with media mogul John Malone’s Liberty Media Corp.
Douglas County-based Liberty owned about 30 percent of IAC’s equity and about 62 percent of the voting power because of a two-tier share structure, although through an agreement with Malone, Diller had controlled Liberty’s votes for years. Malone initially opposed the spinoffs because the new companies have a single-tier voting structure, shrinking Liberty’s power. Liberty sued IAC, but a Delaware judge sided with Diller, and Malone later dropped his appeal.
