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eBay to spin off Skype with IPO in 2010

by Brad Linder on April 14, 2009 at 05:14 PM

It looks like Skype will become its own company again next year. But eBay isn't looking to sell Skype back to founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, despite recent reports that they were hoping to buy the company again. Instead, eBay put out a press release today announcing that it would separate Skype from eBay and sell it through an IPO (initial public offering) in the first half of 2010.

In the release, eBay CEO John Donahoe admits something that most of us have known since eBay first purchsed Skype for around $3 billion: "Skyper has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal." By separating Skype from eBay and running it as its own publicly traded company, Skype can do what's best for a VoIP company and not have to worry about being attached to an online auction house.

Skype generated $551 million in revenue in 2008, and had 405 million registered users.

[via Techmeme]

Tags: ebay, ipo, news, skype

Comments

KarlWApr 15th 2009 7:41AM

Neutral

If Skype's revenue is growing as fast as they say it is:

- Costs are growing even faster, making the business unprofitable or raising questions on the sustainability of profitability
- Or they're idiots and are going to sell a thriving profitable business when it could quite easily be left alone under its own management team as it is now. $1Bn in revenue for an online service with relatively low costs is pretty darn good.

Perhaps they're just making it a subsidiary. That makes little sense if the business is as thriving as eBay say it is, but is sensible if there are doubts and they want to isolate themselves from the fallout as much as possible.

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