It’s now official – Ebay is acquiring Skype.
A press release on the Ebay investor relations website makes it clear:
London, September 12, 2005 – eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY; www.ebay.com) has agreed to acquire Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA, the global Internet communications company, for approximately $2.6 billion in up-front cash and eBay stock, plus potential performance-based consideration. The acquisition will strengthen eBay’s global marketplace and payments platform, while opening several new lines of business and creating significant new monetization opportunities for the company. The deal also represents a major opportunity for Skype to advance its leadership in Internet voice communications and offer people worldwide new ways to communicate in a global online era. Skype, eBay and PayPal will create an unparalleled ecommerce and communications engine for buyers and sellers around the world.
“Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community,” said Meg Whitman, President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay. “By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net.”
[…] eBay will host an investor conference call to discuss the announcement at 5 am Pacific Time today. A live webcast of the conference call can be accessed through the eBay’s Investor Relations website at http://investor.ebay.com. An archive of the webcast will be accessible through the same link.
See Ebay’s PDF press release for the complete announcement.
[Edit] Skype has also posted the press release.
Good news for Skype founders but maybe not so good news for Skype users. How will Skype users look upon beeing associated with eBay? Skype has very much developed as a free and independant voip phone service so the question is if Skype users now will move to Gtalk since Google is more a information service then eBay. Time will tell.
Those are interesting points, Jan-Erik, which undoubtedly we’ll see lots of comment and opinion about in media reporting and in blogs.
For Skype users, I would expect that addressing such concerns would be a fundamental part of both companies’ communication plans. Also eBay and PayPal users – what does this mean for them? Employees of both companies, too.
When rumours first appeared last week about eBay as a suitor, I posted commentary that included my comment that I couldn’t see what the synergy would be for an eBay/Skype combination. I wasn’t the only one asking that question. The press release goes a way to answering that; I imagine the investor call today will add more to the outline in the release.
In any event, this is a pretty high profile event which makes for a very interesting time for the communicators.