eBay plans Skype public offering in 2010

17 April 2009

With negotiations for the sale of Skype to its original founders having collapsed, the US-based online auction company eBay now plans to divest  the internet telephony services firm through an initial public offering for Skype in the first half of 2010, while remaining a "significant" shareholder.

Skype's founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, made a bid to buy back the company this week, (See: eBay looking to sell Skype to original owners: report), but eBay board members shot down the sale for the moment, saying that it would not fetch a realistic price in the current global economic situation.

With the IPO a year away, CEO John Donahoe said that if the company receives a good offer for Skype, it will evaluate the offer against the expected IPO faring.

With Ebay's e-commerce business and electronic payments facilitator PayPal doing well, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005 during the tenure of its former CEO Meg Whitman, expecting the internet telephony firm to be an added jewel in eBay's operations.

Incidentally, Whitman has announced her candidature for the governorship of California as a Republican candidate.

However, though Skype by itself did well, it hardly added any significant value for eBay even after after four years.