Skype Founders Angling to Re-Acquire Company

For years it’s been clear that the 2005 acquisition of Skype made little sense for eBay (EBAY), and eBay CEO John Donahoe has told associates he’d be willing to unload the Internet-calling service bought by his predecessor, Meg Whitman, for a whopping $3.1 billion. Now it appears Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are raising money for a buyback of the company.

Zennstrom and Friis “have approached several private equity firms and are pooling their own substantial resources to make a bid for the Internet calling service,” The New York Times has reported.

Such a deal would remove the Skype drag on eBay’s balance sheet and free up Skype to produce new services to capitalize on its huge user base.

With more than 405 million registered users (nearly eight times the number when eBay bought it), Skype is now the world’s largest long-distance phone company. It generated about half-a-billion dollars in revenue in 2008, an impressive total but a paltry revenue-per-user mark. Skype has recently released a popular application for iPhone, and is expected to launch a BlackBerry version next month; the company is also pushing aggressively into the business market.

Going the private equity route would give Skype the freedom to pursue innovative new services without the pressure of Wall Street expectations. Complicating matters, though, is a legal battle between eBay and Joltid, a holding company formed by Zennstrom and Friis to control the intellectual property behind Skype’s VoIP technology. eBay disclosed in an SEC filing on April 1 that Joltid has terminated the license allowing Skype, and thus eBay, to use the technology. The outcome of that litigation could help determine the fate of Skype as an independent entity.