The popular VoIP service Skype started out as an independent company, and it may soon end up the same way. Skype's founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are reportedly looking for ways to buy the company back from eBay, after having sold it to the auction giant in 2005. eBay may be open to such a deal too, as the two companies have had trouble meshing right from the start.
Zennstrom and Friis sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for US$2.6 billion in cash and stock, with the possibility of an additional $1.5 billion payout if certain financial goals were met. At the time, eBay planned to integrate Skype's technologies into its online auction business, providing buyers with a "click to call" button on auctions so that they could ask questions and communicate with sellers. eBay also postulated that it could use Skype on its own customer support site, giving consumers a problem-solving option in addition to eBay's Web interface.
Unfortunately, that was apparently the end of the good times for Skype and eBay as a joint entity. Not long after the buyout, eBay made a filing with the SEC in which it admitted that it would take $1.4 billion in charges thanks to Skype and that Zennstrom would be stepping down as CEO to become a nonexecutive chairman. A major Skype service outage only helped to highlight that things weren't going well.
Needless to say, Skype has been bleeding money and the aforementioned performance goals were not met, so the current value of the Skype purchase ended up being around $1.1 billion. In addition, most of eBay's lofty goals for incorporating Skype into its services never came to fruition, though a number of new features have been introduced to Skype in the meantime.
As we noted last year, eBay never actually seemed to put any effort towards integrating Skype into eBay's services—the company seemed to have bought Skype and set it on auto-pilot (destination: nowhere) almost immediately. Then, in late 2008, eBay CEO John Donahoe mentioned during the company's quarterly earnings call that it was time to finally "test synergies" or it could be the moment to send Skype on its way.
That brings us to where we are today: Zennstrom and Friis are supposedly in talks with private equity firms to raise $1 billion, which they'd add to their own resources in order to buy Skype back, according to sources speaking to The New York Times. It's not clear right now whether the two have entered into talks with eBay as of yet, though some analysts believe that eBay would be willing to sell Skype back for around $1.7 billion.
At this point, if the two are able to get the financing they need, it seems like eBay would have no problem selling Skype back to them. To put it in business speak, the "synergies" have not been "strong" between the two companies, so almost any deal is likely to be fair game for the right price.
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