eBay and Skype tie the knot. PayPal in there too.
They paid two and a half billion for Skype. I had no idea they were worth that much. And I don't see why. Sounds like eBay doesn't know what to do with it's bucks.
Look for something outlandish out of Google now that they have billions burning a hole in their pocket.
The New York Times
September 12, 2005
EBay to Buy Leading Internet Phone Firm for $2.6 Billion
By TERENCE NEILAN
EBay has agreed to buy Skype Technologies, the Internet phone company based in Luxembourg, for about $2.6 billion in cash and stock, the companies announced today.
Skype has 54 million members in 225 countries and territories, the company said, adding that it is acquiring about 150,000 users a day. In North America, Skype has more users and serves more voice minutes than any other Internet voice communications provider, according to the companies' announcement of the deal today.
"Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community," said Meg Whitman, president and chief executive of eBay. "By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the net."
Cable providers and Bell companies are expanding quickly into the rapidly growing market for Internet-based phone service, as are eBay rivals like Microsoft and Google.
Skype allows users who download its software and register for its service to talk to one another free over the Internet through their PC's. About two million Skype customers have signed up for a premium pay service that allows them to use their PC's to make calls to regular phone numbers as well as receive calls from regular phones.
Skype's software also offers features that include voicemail, instant messaging, call forwarding and conference calling.
Last month, Google announced a service similar to Skype's free service called Google Talk, and Microsoft said it was acquiring Teleo, a San Francisco company that allows users to call conventional phones from their PC's. The discussions between eBay and Skype were first reported in The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.
The acquisition of Skype is eBay's biggest purchase since it bought the Internet Auction Company of South Korea in 2004 for $4.3 billion. EBay has been aggressively acquiring companies, many of them overseas, as it reaches beyond its core online auction business.
Skype was founded in 2002 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who also founded Kazaa, the popular and controversial file-sharing service. |
