It is still uncertain if they are, indeed, in negotiations with eBay

Apr 15, 2009 05:59 GMT  ·  By

Recently, it has been revealed that the European founders of the most well-known VoIP service, namely Skype, are trying to become its rightful owners again by purchasing it back from eBay. The persons in question are Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who have reportedly approached a number of private equity firms and are gathering their own personal resources to make an offer to Skype's current owner, eBay.

The two Europeans have sold the application back in 2005 for $2.6 billion, while the subsequent payments have raised this sum to $3.1 billion. After this, the Swedish Niklas Zennstrom and the Danish Janus Friis have founded a venture capital firm called Atomico, and have supported the Joost online video service, both of them being based in London, UK.

The two men sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion, and later received bonus payouts that increased the final price to $3.1 billion. Since then, Mr. Zennstrom, a native of Sweden, and Mr. Friis, of Denmark, have created the Atomico venture capital firm and backed the online video service Joost, both based in London.

Currently, Skype's registered users amount to more than 405 million, compared to the 53 million it had when it was acquired by eBay. In addition, the calling service generated $145 million in revenue in the last quarter of 2008. Furthermore, it seems that the low costs for using the service to make international calls to non-Skype users have helped the company obtain about eight percent of the global international calling minutes (according to the TeleGeography market research firm).

Nonetheless, it appears that eBay does not have many synergies with its base e-commerce or payment organizations. Also, the Chief Executive of eBay, John J. Donahoe, has repeatedly announced that Skype could be sold for the proper amount of money.

So far, Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis have not released any comment on the subject, so it is uncertain whether they are, indeed, negotiating with eBay. Apparently, an inside source revealed that these two were striving to raise around one billion dollars from various private investors, and had even taken into consideration the possibility for eBay itself to supply the rest of the funds as a seller's note to complete a sale estimated to be worth more than two billion dollars. At the same time, Alan Marks, spokesman for eBay, declared that the company would not comment either.

On the other hand, analysts believe that eBay wants at least $1.7 billion, this being the value of the calling service on its balance sheet after it wrote off part of the acquisition in 2007.

Also, there have been rumors claiming that eBay is considering selling Skype to another large organization, but it isn't clear if there have been any other offers. Google was quite interested in Skype back in 2005, but since then, it created its own service, called Google Voice, so it is no longer in the cards.

On a different note, it is worth mentioning that selling Skype would surely be a solution to several eBay problems, such as generating income for its US operations. At the end of 2008, eBay reported revenues of $3.19 billion in cash, but since $2.8 billion is located overseas, it would imply high repatriation taxes if the company wanted to invest the money in the US, so its e-commerce marketplace is not as profitable as it was thought to be.