Skype will become independent again next year

The auction site eBay announced on Tuesday evening that the voip service Skype will return to the stock exchange as an independent company in the first half of 2010. This allows eBay to concentrate on its core activities again.

Skype was bought by eBay at the end of 2005, partly with the idea that auction participants would want to discuss their transactions in real time. However, the service did not fit well with eBay’s activities and a year ago the auction site announced that the VoIP service would be sold.

By now it is announced that eBay will sell the service through a share offering in the first half of 2010. A date has not yet been announced; eBay wants to wait for the best market conditions to emerge. It is unclear how much the auction site expects to raise with the issue of Skype shares. It paid $2.6 billion for the VoIP company at the time.

Skype was founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They recently announced that they wanted to buy back eBay’s service, but that plan seems to have been scrapped. Skype had 305 million registered users at the end of 2008, an increase of 47 percent from a year earlier. It generated $551 million in revenue that year, and eBay expects that figure to surpass $1 billion in 2011.