A post 4 hours ago by AFP has revealed that Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark are raising funds via private equity firms to go towards their purchase of Skype at the the estimated price of around $1.7billion.
Ebay purchased Skype for 2.6billion dollars in 2005 from the founders. At the time they saw it as an opportune time to exit the company. Although it had gained 54million users by the time of the sale, Google and Microsoft were looking at moving into this market and at the time Skype looked like it was going to get squeezed out of the market. Lars Godell from Forrester predicted that a big player needed to be behind Skype for it to stand a chance in this new emerging market.
Today, Skype has 405 million users and has held of most of the competition to date and remains one of the most popular VoIP services, and with its recent release of the Skype App for iPhone , as well as its incorpartion into numerous mobile devices, Skype is set to become more popular. Its business model has remained the same though and this maybe where the founders see they can play an important role.
Ebay may also want to only sell it back to the founders as they are currently in legal dispute with Joltid, the company that provides Skype’s peere to peer technology. This company is owned by the original founders of Skype and therefore the sale back to them would most likely see the end to the legal dispute, which could potentially cripple Skype and see them re-design the peer to peer technology they use.
Be sure to read the profile on Niklas Zennström and Skype in this earlier post.
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