Skype plans $100-million IPO
Skype, a pioneer in Internet phone service, is planning to go public.
The Luxembourg company registered for up to $100 million in American depository shares in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.
Skype said in the filing that it had not yet decided on the number of shares in its initial public offering or the price range. The company is looking to have its shares traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Silver Lake Partners, a private-equity firm in Menlo Park, Calif., bought Skype from EBay Inc. in November for about $2 billion.
Skype is about $728 million in debt from the acquisition, and its profit for the first six months of 2010 fell 42% to about $13 million because of interest costs from the sale, according to the filing. Skype’s revenue rose 25% to $406.2 million over the same period.
Revenue has grown as Skype has been able to turn customers on to its payment-based services, such as Skype-to-cellphone or Skype-to-landline calls, the filing said.
The majority of Skype’s customers, however, stick to the company’s free Skype-to-Skype video and voice call service. The free calls can be made between any devices running Skype’s software application. The devices include computers, smart phones, video game consoles and even television sets connected to the Internet.
As of June 30, Skype had 560 million registered users, up 41% from a year earlier, according to the filing. About 124 million users are active on a monthly basis; about 8.1 million of them are monthly paying users who spend, on average, $96 a year, the company said.
Skype doesn’t own or maintain a physical telecommunications network, because its service runs as an application on its users’ existing Internet connections, which allows it to keep many services free, the filing said.
Goldman, Sachs & Co., JPMorgan Securities Inc. and Morgan Stanley will be the joint global coordinators as well as joint book-running managers for the offering, the company said.
The SEC’s review of the company’s IPO registration could take several months.
nathan.olivarezgiles@latimes.com
