• Bloombeg News, Wednesday, April 15, 2009 12:15 PM

EBay is planning an initial public offering for Skype, the Internet telephony unit the online auctioneer acquired for $2.6 billion in 2005. The planned IPO will take place in the first half of 2010, eBay said yesterday. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will lead the underwriting.

According to Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, the eBay-Skype union has been a "marriage made in hell." In an interview, Lindsay said, "The only problem with Skype is it's part of EBay...They will make more money from spinning it out than they ever could by keeping it." How much will eBay make? Paul Bard, an analyst with Renaissance Capital LLC, thinks the IPO could raise between $500 million and $1 billion for the ecommerce giant, depending on how much equity it decides to give up. He added that Skype's market value could be between $3 and $5 billion.

Skype has more than 400 million users, and made $551 million in revenues last year. Last week, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the company's founders, approached several private-equity firms about buying the company back from EBay, but the two sides were unable to come to an agreement on Skype's valuation.

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