NEW YORK (BRAIN) — Liberty Interactive Corp. has divided itself in two, spinning off its digital commerce companies, including Backcountry.com and Competitive Cyclist.com, into a separate entity called Liberty Ventures Group. The remainder of the company will be focused on the QVC home shopping business, and that entity, formerly called Liberty Interactive, has been renamed QVC Group.
To set up the two entities, Liberty Interactive sold the digital commerce companies to its shareholders in exchange for approximately 67.67 million shares of Liberty Ventures common stock and $1 billion. The transaction valued the digital commerce companies, which include Backcountry.com, Bodybuilding.com, CommerceHub, Evite, Provide Commerce and The Right Start, at $1.5 billion. The Liberty Ventures Group also includes a share of the travel website Expedia, and minority interests in Time Warner, Time Warner Cable, Lending Tree and Interval Leisure Group.
"We are excited to introduce the QVC Group which focuses on our leadership position in video commerce, enables a cleaner comparable analysis and provides for more targeted share repurchase and equity incentives," said Greg Maffei, Liberty Interactive president and CEO.
Liberty Interactive has changed its NASDAQ symbols, LINTA and LINTB, to QVCA and QVCB for its A- and B Series common stock, respectively. The Liberty Ventures stock will use the LVNTA and LVNTB symbols. The BRAIN Stock Chart page will now track the LVNTA stock instead of the Liberty Mutual stock.
Immediately after the transaction, Liberty Interactive's board declared a special dividend of the Liberty Ventures shares which will be paid out to owners of outstanding shares of QVC Group Series A common stock and QVC Group Series B common stock on Oct. 13.
