Skype gets new owners and a $2.75 billion valuation
Skype has finally been sold off from beleaguered auction house eBay, though they will retain a 30 percent stake in the company.
Skype, a leader in the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) business, was purchased in Oct. 2005 by eBay in a deal that didn’t make sense to many observers. While eBay always said it planned to integrate the service into its auction listings to ease communication between sellers and buyers, that never really materialized to any great success. While it did show up in a few places on the site, it didn’t take off, and critics wondered what eBay would end up doing with a service that had next to no relation to its core business of auctions.
Now eBay has been trying to sell off the majority of the service for a while, and as of September of this year the company had lined up buyers in the form of Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Joltid Limited and original company founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.
This deal comes on the heels of Zennström and Friis finally settling a lawsuit that called into question who owned the patents on the core technology of Skype. If the two founders had won, Skype would have had to be rewritten from the ground up with all new technology which would have delayed the sale of the company for ages. Thanks to the lawsuit finally being settled out of court, the sale went forward and the two founders were able to get back partial control of the company.
The company was sold at a valuation of $2.75 billion, and eBay will retain a 30 percent stake in the company with the remaining 70 percent being divided up amongst the investors.
While eBay never did anything that odd with the service, it does feel good to have one of my personal favorite services freed and under its own control again.
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