MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ca. – eBay announced Tuesday that it is selling its Skype unit to an investor group that includes Netscape founder Marc Andreessen’s new venture.
Under the deal, eBay will receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million, for a total of $2.025 billion. The participants expect the deal to close in the fourth quarter, CNET News.Com reported.
The investor group, which will take a roughly 65 percent stake in Skype, is led by Silver Lake and includes Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The remaining 35 percent of the Internet telephony service will be retained by eBay.
The parties said the deal values Skype, which is likely to see an IPO in the coming months, at $2.75 billion.
The sale of Skype had been expected for some time. Word of Tuesday’s impending sale to the private investor group was first reported late Monday in The New York Times.
The Andreessen Horowitz venture capital group was launched in July by Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and co-founder of Opsware, and Ben Horowitz, also co-founder of Opsware.
With the sale, eBay acknowledged that things hadn’t worked out as planned with Skype, which it acquired for $2.6 billion in 2005 with the plans to offer customers the ability to discuss their transactions in real time. Over the course of the four years since then, eBay found that its acquisition failed to provide what it sought.
In 2007, eBay said it would take a $900 million so-called impairment write down against the value of Skype, meaning that eBay had been forced to reassess the value of the Internet telephony company relative to its overall business. By recording a charge, the company essentially announced it had taken a loss on its original investment.
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