EBay Mulling Skype Sale

MaineCoasts writes "The Financial Times reports that eBay's new CEO is evaluating a sale of Skype if new ways cannot be found for the fast-growing service to support its core e-commerce business. EBay reported earlier this week that Skype had a 61 percent increase in first-quarter revenue over the same quarter last year and now has 309 million users worldwide."

Comments

Retarded CEOs

[wiredlogic]

Let's get this straight. You have a thriving subsidiary with strong growth but it isn't sufficiently enmeshed with your core business to make you happy as the CEO or eBay. Your options are to:

1) Keep the business unit and enjoy sleeping in even larger piles of Franklins
2) Sell it off to hide some nasty financials in the core business with some Jedi accounting tricks
3) Hand the reins over to CowboyNeal and let him run the show

It seems to me like this guy is looking to bail out on eBay in the next couple of years and wants to have a successful divestiture to feather his cap. This is typical of the sort of short sighted bullshit that publicly traded American companies go through nowadays because the overpaid people running them don't care about anything other than their own career track.

total failure

[owlnation]

From their initial IPO eBay's share were the darling of the Nasdaq. They rose srtongly and consistently.

The day eBay bought Skype their share price went through the floor. It has never recovered.

Just as well Meg Whitman is already leaving, they really should have fired her a long time ago.

Re:No way ...

[smittyoneeach]

As with the original purchase, I always get the feeling that much of the real business going on is not exactly public information.