It's Official: eBay Sells Skype for $1.9 Billion

From PC World: It's official: eBay has sold Skype to a group of private investors for $1.9 billion, the company announced on Tuesday. That consortium of private investors now owns 65 percent of the Internet-based calling business.

The news comes as no surprise. Late last week, TechCrunch was already hinting at an investor group making a play for Skype, and the New York Times confirmed the speculation earlier today in another report.

According to reports, the investment group purchasing Skype includes Andressen Horowitz, a new venture capital firm led by Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape. The other owners in the group are Silver Lake, a Silicon Valley-based private equity group, Index ventures, a London-based VC firm, and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board

eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005, at which time the auction site actually outbid Google and Yahoo to close the deal. Since then, however, eBay has failed to incorporate Skype technologies into its e-commerce site and quickly realized that acquiring Skype wasn't such a bargain. eBay couldn't find viable way to tie its services with Skype, and later wrote off $900 million of Skype's value. Today's deal puts Skype's overall value at $2.75 billion.

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