EBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) shares climbed 4.4% in morning trading Thursday after an upbeat assessment from execs at the online auction company.
As expected, the company's PayPal online payment subsidiary was a particularly bright spot in an analyst meeting TWednesday. The business, which eBay acquired in 2002 for $1.5 billion, will double in size by 2011, eBay said. The news prompted Merrill Lynch & Co. (NYSE:MER) analyst Justin Post Thursday to muse whether eBay might consider changing its stock symbol to PAPL.
There's no doubt that the PayPal deal was one of the most successful big-ticket technology acquisitions from early in this decade, and a perfect fit for eBay. But even eBay's Skype telephony unit, which the company acquired for $3.1 billion and has not lived up to expectations, saw growth acceleration.
While Post said efforts to monetize the acquisition are "still in their infancy," the analyst applauded Skype's 38% year-over-year growth.
That said, some believe dark clouds could be ahead for the unit, in the form of a new Internet calling service from Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). The search giant last night
announced on its corporate blog the introduction of Google Voice, which enables calls from any phone, including cell phones. The service is free for U.S. calls and for international calls, it will charge a fraction of what traditional phone companies do. It also converts voicemails to text.
The Google news marks the second announcement this week of the company integrating acquired technology into its own offerings. It acquired the foundation of Google Voice via the 2007 purchase of GrandCentral Communications for an undisclosed price.
Wednesday, Google
unveiled its new behavior-targeted ad technology, some of which was derived from its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc.
- Olaf de Senerpont Domis
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Skype won’t be sold for awhile. There’s a class action in progress against it in the state of Washington for taking customers expired credits after 108-days of account inactivity. Ebay can’t sell it until that case is resolved. It just got filed last Dec.
Another class action is brewing up in California for the same thing:
http://www.kbklawfirm.com/skype/