eBay recently announced that it is selling 65 percent of Skype for $1.9 billion. The implied valuation for Skype is $2.75 billion, or about $6 per user. eBay has finally admitted that Skype, a provider of telephony services, just doesn’t fit with eBay’s core businesses.
Skype, which has 500 million users and growing its user base by about 25 percent per annum, is one of the world’s largest communication companies. With its Internet-based business model, Skype is also one of the world’s largest Internet communities. When a Skype user updates his Skype status via the comment box at the top of his Skype screen, he keeps his community abreast of his status. This is very similar to the functions you find on the social media platforms twitter and facebook. Skype offers other community-style features.
The buyer, who will control an approximately 65 percent stake, is an investor group led by Silver Lake that includes Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board. This group is composed of some very smart investors.
I speculate that while eBay sees Skype operating in telephony, the investors see Skype’s potential in its untapped community of users. After all, in 2004, lead investor Marc Andreessen founded Ning, the “social platform for the world’s interests and passions online.” According Ning’s About webpage, http://about.ning.com, “With more than 1.5 million Ning Networks created and 33 million registered users, millions of people every day are coming together across Ning to explore and express their interests, discover new passions, and meet new people around shared pursuits.”
Whether you position Skype as a telephony company or as a social media enterprise matters a great deal for how you value it. If you look at Skype purely as a communication company, the $2.75 billion price tag is probably a fair price to pay for this entity. However, if you look at the latest rounds of funding for twitter and facebook, you get a pretty good idea of the value of Internet communities. Last spring, facebook rejected an investment valuing the company at $8 billion, or about $32 per user. Early this year, twitter raised money at a $250 million valuation, which would value the company at about $50 per user. These numbers are very rough, but they far surpass the $6 eBay is receiving per Skype user.
The investor group will most likely add value to their investment by using Skype’s leading platform and adding more social media features for its users. As they move the Skype needle toward community, Skype’s valuation could expand significantly.
Ok, a return on this investment of a few billions might be optimistic but you get the point.