It has come to pass: internet telephony firm Skype has been bought. By eBay. For $2.6bn.
eBay agreed to buy Skype Technologies for $2.6 billion in cash and stock, adding 50 million users of software for making phone calls over the Internet.
The acquisition may include as much as $1.5 billion in additional payments based on Skype's performance, the companies said in a Business Wire statement today. The purchase of closely held Skype, based in Luxembourg, consists of $1.3 billion in cash and 32.4 million shares of San Jose, California-based eBay.
Dotcom days are here again. It's the latest in a series of acquisitions this year which are reinvigorating a technology sector which was thought (by the mainstream at least) to still be in the doldrums of 2000. In fact, the market's been vibrant for some time: it's part of what is making technology a very exciting subject at the moment.
But Skype has obviously decided - possibly apropos of Google Talk - that its best interests lie in the hands of somebody bigger and more powerful. And why eBay? Well, you can't get much bigger - and it's a company with a wide history of buyouts. EBay's fingers are now in a huge number of pies around the globe.
Cry "Havoc" and let slip the geeks of war!
