Skype has filed for an IPO, revealing some interesting facts about the VoIP company. It was just about a year ago that online auction powerhouse eBay sold a 70 percent stake in Skype for a whopping $2.7 billion. According to SEC documents, Skype paid out $344 million to settle a dispute with the original creators of the Skype software, and even more interesting is the fact that only a very small percentage of Skype users pay for the value-added services. Turns out most Skype users are like most everybody on the Internet–we want it for free! Great for us, but is it good for Skype? Back in the heady days of the dotcom boom, I saw plenty of dotcoms with great technology and fantastic ideas that never made any money–but there is some revenue.
According to the SEC documents, revenue for the first six months of 2010 was $406 million, with net income of $13 million and gross margin of 51 percent. Quite a lot more than most of those early dotcoms that disappeared into the ethers so many years ago. Skype users made 95 billion minutes of calls during those first six months, and there are about 124 million active users per month. With that many users, it doesn’t take a big percentage of paid users to make a company profitable. Out of those 124 million users, 8.1 million paid an average of $96 a year.
The filing says Skype’s strategy is to convert more of those free customers to paid customers, and the company hopes to introduce new enterprise products to bring Skype firmly into the world of business.
