QVC To Be Spun Off As Its Own Stock

How much do you really love QVC? Is it enough to buy its stock?

Liberty Interactive Corp., the parent of the No. 1 home shopping network, made some moves Friday to pave the way to spinning off QVC as its own tracking stock.

It did that by sliding its digital commerce companies — Backcountry.com, Bodybuilding.com, CommerceHub, Evite, Provide Commerce and The Right Start — into a new company called Liberty Ventures Group. Those assets are valued at $1.5 billion, and $1 billion in cash.

In return, Liberty Interactive Group shareholders will receive roughly 67.67 million shares of Liberty Ventures common stock or about 0.14 of a Liberty Ventures share for each share of Liberty Interactive Group common stock outstanding on the record date.

“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,” Greg Maffei, Liberty Interactive President and CEO, said in a canned statement.

“The Liberty Ventures Group is projected to have over $2.7 billion in cash by year end which we can invest in a wide set of opportunities in TMT, including digital commerce.”

In exchange for the digital commerce companies and $970 million of cash (collectively, the “Reattributed Assets”), an inter-group interest in Liberty Ventures Group was created in favor of the Liberty Interactive Group, which we now refer to as the QVC Group.

In other words, the bottom line is that QVC and Liberty’s stake in HSN, will have the name QVC Group.