IACI on its acquisition of Cornerstone (quotes from investor conf)

IAC (ticker: IACI) CFO Tom McInerney discussed the rationale for IAC's acquisition of catalog and web retailer Cornerstone in his presentation to the Bear Stearns Annual Media Conference:

This acquisition really hit the sweet spot of three things. One … this is one of the best Internet interactive retailing companies we could possibly acquire.

Secondly, it is highly strategic and fits great with HSN… we have significantly closed the gap on many different ways in which one competes in this space in terms of service, presentation, on-air look, etc.

One of the big opportunities, however, was to just enhance the brands at our fingertips, the product variety, the product quality that the Cornerstone Brands businesses bring. So we will immediately… bring these products and brands, about two-thirds of which are proprietary and have great consumer appeal as you can see from the metrics, to the HSN audience on television, on dot-com. We will cross promote between now those 8 million customers…

And the third big thing is just financially makes sense. An all-cash deal. It is accretive right from the beginning without the benefit of synergies, and obviously with growth in synergies will become even more so over time.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)