Based on the article about InterActiveCorp, the corporate level strategy is gaining acquisitions in travel, finance, and classified ads. This sounds like a horizontal merger and acquisition strategy because of the range of services that IAC has been acquiring. Their focus seems to be mostly travel and entertainment companies. These include companies like Match.com, Expedia, and Hotels.com. As for the restructuring strategies for IAC, Barry Diller is trying to focus on businesses that focus solely on e-commerce. He picks highly fragmented industries and intermediates between these businesses and customers. The types of fragmented industries stated in this article are travel, personal finance, and local entertainment. Diller is using more of an eBay strategy as opposed to Amazon.com in terms of gaining business. In this extent, IAC gathers large amounts of customers and delivers them to the sellers of the services or products. To me this sounds like an organizational restructuring strategy because he is trying to change how the organization runs their day to day operations. This includes allowing other heads of the business run their own operations and Diller is in control of the more important issues like mergers and budgets.
I think that IAC’s corporate level core competencies are surrounded by their knowledge of acquisitions and mergers. Another core competency is the adoption of decentralizing management. This allows each manager to run the day to day operations and provides more empowerment in the organization. The article discusses how Diller’s “strategy is based on the notion that Web middlemen can profit handsomely by bringing buyers and sellers together”. By acquiring Expedia he gained a combination powerful resources in regards to innovation and acquisitions.
The most interesting part of the article about InterActiveCorp for me was that this is such a big company but I had never heard of IAC before. I found it interesting how much