In August, 2010 Skype filed with the SEC for a $100 million IPO that could be the biggest deal by a technology company since Google. It expects to raise a maximum of $100 million through the sale, though the amount of shares being offered and the price range have yet to be disclosed.
Goldman, Sachs & Co., J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. and Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated will be the joint global coordinators as well as joint book-running managers for the offering.
In 2005, Skype was sold to eBay in a deal that valued the company at $2.26 billion. In late 2009, the online auction house sold a 70% equity stake in Skype to a private investor consortium led by Silver Lake Partners for $1.9 billion in cash, leaving 30% control of the company under eBay control.
In 2008, Skype generated revenue of $551 million from 405 million users. The company reportedly brought in more than $600 million in its 2009 fiscal year, and recently announced that it expected Skype to top $1 billion in revenue in 2011. Skype’s new application for the iPhone was downloaded two million times in its first week, and has become one of the most popular third-party applications on the device.
Seven year-old, Luxembourg-based Skype is a peer-to-peer Internet telephone service that is free for Skype-to-Skype calls and has charge plans for non-Skype-to-Skype calls. The service has 560 million registered users, about 8 million of which pay for charge plans.
For travelers working abroad, the Skype to non-Skype service provides real cost savings. A 30-minute call from Buenos Aires to NYC, for example, costs less than a dollar. According to the Wall Street Journal, Skype hopes to expand its platform for business-related purposes, including its two existing business products, Skype Connect and Skype Manager.
In October 2010, Skype named Tony Bates as its CEO. Before joining Skype, he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business Group. Prior to that, he was Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Service Provider business unit, and previously Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s high-end router business. He has also served as a Member of the Board of YouTube, Inc.
In 2009, Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, not ones to rest on their laurels, launched Rdio, a live music streaming service that allows Internet users to share music files without violating copyright laws by not actually downloading the file.
