Rumors are that Google is having its thoughts on buying Skype. Skype acquired by eBay in late 2005 has been under crisis and eBay has suffered huge losses due to its financial performance.
In late 2005, eBay paid $3.1 billion and acquired Skype and had a huge one-time loss of $936 million due to huge earn out by Skype stockholders. Eventually, eBay sacked co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Niklas Zennstorm.
These events portray eBay willingness to remove the burden of Skype or at least increase the performance.
In the turn out of these events and Google’s long time plan of dominating the VoIP industry, it is seen that Google has talks on buying Skype. It should also be noted that Google has VoIP service through GTalk and on 2007 aquired GrandCentral a leading telephone management service.
Skype has VOIP, VOIP2POTS and P2P Video and has over 100 billion VOIP Minutes logged so far. Skype also handles an average of 10 million simultaneous users. This should definitely be a driving factor for Google’s acquisition plan.