The unlisted company was valued around $300 billion recently, or roughly $170 per share, in the private-equity secondary market, down from a peak of around $400 billion reached last year, sources have said. The 10-year-old company usually launches stock option buybacks twice a year for employees, separate sources have said.īyteDance had explored conducting an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong, different sources have told Reuters.īut earlier this year, Chief Financial Officer Julie Gao told employees at an internal meeting that the company had no timeline for an IPO,according to people who attended the meeting. The economic slowdown in China, much of which is due to stringent COVID-19 curbs, and Beijing's regulatory crackdown on the tech sector have crimped earnings as well as valuation prospects for many Chinese tech firms.Īfter receiving the company's email, some ByteDance employees told Reuters that they were considering cashing out some or all of their holdings as they believe it's a good price to sell given the overall economic environment. One of the world's most valuable private tech companies, it has launched various incentive plans this year including stock option granting programmes at a lower price amid slowing revenue growth, which fell to 70% last year from more than 100% a year earlier. It could not be immediately determined how many RSUs have been issued or how much ByteDance has set aside for the buyback. To put it in business speak, the "synergies" have not been "strong" between the two companies, so almost any deal is likely to be fair game for the right price.ByteDance, which has around 110,000 employees globally, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It's not clear right now whether the two have entered into talks with eBay as of yet, though some analysts believe that eBay would be willing to sell Skype back for around $1.7 billion.Īt this point, if the two are able to get the financing they need, it seems like eBay would have no problem selling Skype back to them. That brings us to where we are today: Zennstrom and Friis are supposedly in talks with private equity firms to raise $1 billion, which they'd add to their own resources in order to buy Skype back, according to sources speaking to The New York Times. Then, in late 2008, eBay CEO John Donahoe mentioned during the company's quarterly earnings call that it was time to finally "test synergies" or it could be the moment to send Skype on its way. In addition, most of eBay's lofty goals for incorporating Skype into its services never came to fruition, though a number of new features have been introduced to Skype in the meantime.Īs we noted last year, eBay never actually seemed to put any effort towards integrating Skype into eBay's services-the company seemed to have bought Skype and set it on auto-pilot (destination: nowhere) almost immediately. Needless to say, Skype has been bleeding money and the aforementioned performance goals were not met, so the current value of the Skype purchase ended up being around $1.1 billion. A major Skype service outage only helped to highlight that things weren't going well. Not long after the buyout, eBay made a filing with the SEC in which it admitted that it would take $1.4 billion in charges thanks to Skype and that Zennstrom would be stepping down as CEO to become a nonexecutive chairman. Unfortunately, that was apparently the end of the good times for Skype and eBay as a joint entity. eBay also postulated that it could use Skype on its own customer support site, giving consumers a problem-solving option in addition to eBay's Web interface. At the time, eBay planned to integrate Skype's technologies into its online auction business, providing buyers with a "click to call" button on auctions so that they could ask questions and communicate with sellers. Zennstrom and Friis sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for US$2.6 billion in cash and stock, with the possibility of an additional $1.5 billion payout if certain financial goals were met. eBay may be open to such a deal too, as the two companies have had trouble meshing right from the start. Skype's founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are reportedly looking for ways to buy the company back from eBay, after having sold it to the auction giant in 2005. The popular VoIP service Skype started out as an independent company, and it may soon end up the same way.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |