Ebay may sell Skype

When Ebay acquired Skype we thought that they grossly overpaid when they bought it for $3.1 billion.  Don't get us wrong, we love Skype and were one of the early beta users of it.  But we were always skeptical of Ebay's plans to try to make Skype a major part of their auction platform.  Then they wrote it down by $1.4 billion, and we laughed.  Now they're thinking about selling it altogether if they can't make it work for them by the end of the year.  Go figure.  LOL. 

Ebay will consider selling off its Skype internet phone subsidiary at the end of this year if it fails to find ways to use the fast-growing service to support its core e-commerce business, according to the company’s chief executive.

The comments from John Donahoe, who took over at the end of last month, are the most direct indication yet that Ebay is thinking of scrapping the ill-starred acquisition. It paid $3.1bn, but wrote down the value of the business by $1.4bn last year after concluding it would not match earlier hopes.

Ebay originally believed that Skype would oil the wheels of its online markets by making communications easier between buyers and sellers, while also supporting new business models such as “click to call”. Nearly three years after the acquisition, however, Ebay has yet to prove Skype can help its other businesses.

While the acquisition of Skype has widely come to be seen as a blunder for Ebay, the phone service itself has continued to grow fast, adding another 33m registered users in the first three months of this year to reach 309m. Although most use it for free internet phone calls, the addition of extra paid services helped Skype to increase its revenues to $126m in the first three months of this year, up 61 per cent from the year before.

Ebay considers sale of Skype subsidiary - Financial Times