Here’s a novel idea – buy back the company you sold a few years ago for half the price you sold it for. Nice work if you can get it, and it seems Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are about to embark on exactly that line of employment.

For those who don’t know, which is probably no one with even an inkling of interest and knowledge in technology, Skype is a piece of software that allows phone calls to be made over the Internet. It’s one of the most simple and obvious ideas but the system had to be created and distributed before it could become the phenomenon it is today.

Millions of people use the service to make telephone calls over the Internet free of charge. For a small fee, Skype users can also speak to people on landline and mobile phones as well. The app is also available on the iPhone and will soon be available on the Blackberry too.

Zennstrom and Friis sold Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005. After further bonus payouts they made $3.1 total in the deal. Now, according to The New York Times, the pair are preparing to make a bid to buy the company back from eBay, albeit at a much-reduced rate.

Under eBay’s ownership the service has gone from strength to strength, with user numbers rising from 53 million at the time of sale to the current 405 million. Skype is now estimated to handle 8 percent of the world’s international calling minutes. But Skype doesn’t seem to have fitted in well with eBay’s core business of e-commerce and online payments (PayPal), and it seems the company would be willing to sell under the right circumstances.

Zennstrom and Friis are thought to have approached several private equity firms in a bid to raise the cash to make a bid. But with a price of around $1.7 billion being sought by eBay, I would have thought the pair could afford to buy Skype back without any external help.

Skype is thought to be on course to make up to $800 million in revenue this year, which is obviously the draw for Zennstrom and Friis. As for eBay, it needs the cash to shore up the U.S. side of its business and that $1.7 would go a long way. However, it would mean the company seeing a loss of $1.4 billion between buying and selling. That’s got to smart a little.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 9:42 pm under Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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