Angi Inc.

Welcome to the IAC and ANGI fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After introductory remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad, and to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Christopher Halpin, Executive Vice President, CFO, and COO of IAC. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Christopher Halpin here, and welcome to the IAC and Angie Inc. Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. Joining me today are Barry Diller, Senior Executive and Chairman of IAC, Joey Levin, CEO of IAC and Chairman of Angie Inc., and Jeff Kip, CEO of Angie Inc. Supplemental to our quarterly earnings releases, IAC and Angie have each published shareholder letters, which are currently available on their investor relations sections of their respective websites. We will not be reading the shareholder letters on this call. I will shortly turn the call over to Barry and then Joey to make a few introductory remarks, followed by Q&A. Before we get to that, I'd like to remind you that during this presentation, We may make certain statements that are considered forward-looking under the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements may include statements related to our outlook, strategy, and future performance and are based on our current expectations and on information currently available to us. Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from the future results expressed or implied in these statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties. including those contained in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q, our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and in the subsequent reports that we file with the SEC. The information provided on this conference call should be considered in light of such risks. We'll also discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which, as a reminder, include adjusted EBITDA, which we will refer to today as EBITDA for simplicity during the call. I'll refer you to our earnings releases, the IAC and Angie shareholder letters, our public filings with the SEC, and again, to the investor relations sections of our respective websites for all comparable gap measures and full reconciliations for all material non-gap measures. And now I will turn it over to our senior executive and chairman, Barry Diller.

Thank you, Kris. Yes, I am definitely the very senior executive, but it's nice to talk with you this morning. I haven't been on one of these calls in I think a little more than 10 years and hopefully you will not want me to wait another 10 years before I do it again. But what I wanted to do really is to review what's really happened in this company over the last couple of years. About two years ago we of course realized that our two Two of our principal businesses, Angie and Dot Dash, were troubled. Here's what the troubles were. We had taken Angie, which the prior year had about $260 million of EBITDA, down to $35 million. Our tab act shot up to $115 million. On dot dash Meredith, the initial plot after the acquisition was we thought we would do $450 million in EBITDA. Actually, the plot for that particular year, this was one and a half years ago, three years ago, went from $335 million down to $230 million. I felt, as did Joey Levin and our colleagues, that we were really in a crisis, and we had to fix these two principal businesses. So we essentially stopped everything. We did not want to do things that either extended the amount of work we had to do into other areas that weren't as important. knew that we had to hit the ground and really spend, and we thought at the time it would take certainly a year, maybe two, to get these businesses back to performing. And so we froze everything, basically, other than attending to those two businesses and getting them back on a track where they needed to be. Angie, some of this of course you all know, but I really want to put this in context because I do think it is at least from my point of view, it clarifies what the company has been doing in these last couple of years and where we are now and where I think we will be in the future. First thing we did is we replaced the CEO of Angie with Joey Levin, who was kind of also obviously at that time he was the CEO of IAC, but we said, okay, we'll take all the other areas of IAC. You concentrate on fixing Angie. We immediately got rid of the low quality and the low margin revenue which reduced our revenue and we stopped the capital expenditures at anything near that level. I think we went from 115 if I recall correctly, or I said correctly earlier, to about 50. And what happened is that, of course, the profit and the cash flow went back onto a positive track. We also appointed Jeff Kip to be the CEO. He had been running the international businesses really well. And at the essence, Angie, like all these entities, they're product companies and we had to fix the product. All of that work has been in train for these last couple of years. And Angie now is back, as you can see from the figures. It is back from where it was. and many more. Thank you for joining us. As you all know, when people talk about integration and synergies and all of that, they can talk a good game, but when you get right down to it, it's a tough slog. And it was a very difficult year and a half as Top Dash got invested in digital. The great mix is get this whole thing in train, on train. I'll just give you just one I don't do stats very well so This is my one thing on stats, which is the digital revenue growth. I found this very stark. This is Q2 of 22. I'm just going to read you consecutive six, seven quarters. Down seven, down 13%, down 15%.