A New York Times report says Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, founders of Internet telephony Skype Technologies SA, are looking to
buy the company back from eBay Inc. (Nasdaq:EBAY) for about $2 billion. eBay wouldn't confirm the report but one thing is for sure, it's looking for buyers and has been for quite some time.
eBay did a fair job selling the deal to investors in 2005, but perhaps should have paid more attention to integration -- as many people pointed out when the deal was announced -- rather than a complicated
earnout structure. The online auctioneer thought Luxembourg's Skype would diversify its business and that its rapid growth would bring in revenue as the auction market matured. The growth came but the money didn't and a $1.4 billion writedown was recorded even as Skype added hundreds of millions of users in the past couple years.
eBay combined Skype with its core online auction business and PayPal Inc. payments processing service but
integration hasn't gone well and eBay chief executive John Donahoe mentioned a year ago he was
open to selling. As noted in a previous blog eBay apparently did little to get the companies' engineering teams working together or to market the Internet phone option in any meaningful way. An ars technica report suggested, "eBay seems to have bought Skype and set it on auto-pilot (destination: nowhere) almost immediately."
The Times says Zennstrom and Friis are teaming up with private equity firms to buy the company back. One tech blog says
Skype has enormous global street cred and with the ultra portability of mobile phones and WiFi connectivy become increasingly ubiquitous, VoIP is moving far away from the geeky confines of its headset-and-desktop roots.
In other eBay news, reports say the San Jose, Calif., firm is moving into South Korea in a big way as it's in talks to acquire a
controlling stake in online retailer Gmarket Inc. for $413 million. -
Baz HiralalGo to the NYT report
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