EBay Revises Its Ambitions for Skype

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1 — EBay is finally acknowledging that it
paid too much for the Internet phone company Skype two years ago.

EBay is taking a $1.4 billion write-down for Skype, the Internet phone company; Niklas Zennstrom will no longer be its chief.
On Monday, eBay,

based in San Jose, Calif., said it was taking a $1.43 billion charge
related to the acquisition of Skype. EBay paid $2.6 billion for the
rapidly growing service in 2005.

Since the purchase,
Skype’s membership rolls have swelled past 220 million. But the
company has not had as much success making money as it has had growing.
Skype does not charge its users for calls to other Skype users. There
is only a small fee for calls to landline numbers and cellphones.

Skype
earned $90 million during the second quarter of 2007, far below
eBay’s projections. EBay said in a regulatory filing that the
charge was “the result of the updated long-term financial outlook
for Skype.”

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