eBay to Sell Skype to Google?
Many in the tech community have wondered why on earth eBay decided to buy Skype. Supposedly, they wanted the Internet phone service so buyers and sellers could communicate more easily regarding their transactions. However, Skype has proven to be nothing but a financial burden to eBay, in spite of its estimated $400 million a year in revenues. Now rumors are circulating that eBay is going to sell the service to Google.
Google has been dabbling in the VoIP realm with last year’s $50 million purchase of GrandCentral, a service that provides users the ability to aggregate their voice mail services and phone numbers into an easily accessed web-based platform. There is also GTalk and their useful 411 service.
However, the purchase of Skype would go a long way in bringing it all together. Putting Skype in more capable hands than eBay could serve to make it more profitable as well. It’s not doing particularly badly with eBay and may garner $600 million in revenues this year. In better hands, though, it may evolve even further.
There is some argument about whether Skype has peaked or if it is on its way even higher. The service itself can kind of be a pain to install and use, and per call charges aren’t any picnic either. But though there are some issues with the service, a few tweaks might be just what it needs to continue to grow and prosper. And Google may be just the company to deliver those tweaks.
eBay is not particularly broke, and they’ll be unlikely to offload Skype for anything near the $3.1 billion they shelled out for it. In fact, if the $600 million revenue projection is accurate, and you go by the price being ten times revenue model, an asking price of $6 billion isn’t out of the question.
We’ll see if anything happens. This may be a situation where nothing concrete has been discussed but it seems like too good an idea not to consider.
Thanks to Techcrunch and Silicon Alley Insider for some of the info.
Technorati Tags: google, skype, ebay, voip, gtalk, grandcentral
