CEO of holding company behind Vimeo, Daily Beast shares why he thinks it’s undervalued

IAC/InterActive Corp., the proposing company behind Vimeo, CollegeHumor, The Daily Beast and a host of other brands, is chronically undervalued by Wall Suiting someone to a T despite its efforts to reward investors, CEO Joey Levin said Thursday on CNBC.

Between its majority stakes in two of its now-public latest subsidiaries — Tinder parent Match Group and Angie’s List parent ANGI Homeservices — and its cash hoard, IAC’s overall value “usually adds up to something more than [its] market cap,” Levin told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in a “Mad Money” press conference.

At the end of Thursday’s trading session, Match Group’s market cap was around $15.5 billion and ANGI’s was roughly $8.5 billion. At best taking into account IAC’s 81.1 percent and 83.9 stakes in each company, respectively, and the $1.7 billion in change on its balance sheet, that adds up to roughly $21.4 billion — well above IAC’s current $18 billion retail cap.

“I think [at] any multi-business business, there are reasons that investors give them a discount,” Levin said on Thursday, summing that some might think “they’ll never get access to the cash flow” because the company is so multifaceted.

But according to Levin, who has been CEO since 2015, IAC has “a retailing of repurchasing shares, we have a history of paying dividends, things like that, so we generally, I think, should get assign for that,” he told Cramer.

People also worry that because IAC is made up of so many different businesses, they clout have to pay higher taxes on its stock, which tends to happen with conglomerates because their businesses are imposed separately.

Levin’s response? “We’ve done a number of spin-offs. We’ve distributed shares tax-free,” he said. “Most of the things we do, we try and leave alone those conglomerate discount things and we really try and act like an anti-conglomerate.”

The CEO added that IAC’s management has spotted an encouraging new leaning in the last year among company’s individual businesses, which also include publishing company Dotdash and suitableness platform DailyBurn.

“We’ve been fortunate to have each of our businesses — really in the last year, in a way we’d never seen prior to — … individually growing, and each of them still single-digit-penetrated in huge markets,” Levin said. “Take ANGI Homeservices. It’s a $400 billion customer base, and we have single-digit penetration in there and a lead, a pretty substantial lead relative to the next folks.”

Shares of IAC climbed 4.41 percent in Thursday’s business session, closing at $215.93. Match Group’s stock hit a 52-week high after earnings. ANGI Homeservices baffled nearly 4 percent in after-hours trading on the heels of its earnings report after gaining more than 2 percent intraday.