Chapter 720 Selling Skype
In December, when the sovereign debt crisis broke out in the Emirate of Dubai and Greece, and the situation was getting worse, the most eye-catching news was that Microsoft announced that it would acquire Skype for $9 billion.
When Skype went public in early 2007, its market value exceeded $6 billion. At that time, DS Holdings held 61.25% of Skype shares and had 70.13% of its voting rights; O2 Telecom held 8.5% of its shares.
Later, Skype was also affected by the subprime mortgage crisis, and its stock price fell sharply. DS Holdings took the opportunity to increase its holdings, bringing its shareholding to 65%.
In Barron's previous life, Microsoft acquired Skyp for $8.5 billion in 2011. However, because Skype's development was better than in the original time and space at this time, Microsoft had to pay an additional $500 million for it, and finally completed the acquisition of Skype for $9 billion.
The reason is that in the original time and space, Skype was originally acquired by eBay.
The main reason why eBay acquired Skype at that time was to help its website users communicate when shopping online with the help of this Internet phone application.
But the problem is that, as we all know, e-commerce companies cannot make popular social software - for example, Alibaba in China has not made a successful social software even if it has invested heavily.
The reason is that the communication between users of e-commerce websites is mostly in the mode of stranger social communication, and there is very little contact between each other, so they will not build their social network at all.
Social software like Skype is mainly "acquaintance social networking". You don't always like to call strangers, right? Most of the people who can communicate by phone are acquaintances.
Therefore, after eBay acquired Skype in the original time and space, it did not promote its development, but to a certain extent limited the stability of the social network between Skype users.
Now it is different. After being invested by DS Group, they provided Skype with the funds needed for its development, and O2 Telecom also helped them expand their user base.
By now, the number of Skype users worldwide has exceeded 300 million, and Microsoft itself has shortcomings in communication technology. They hope to make up for it by acquiring Skype. They are very optimistic about the development of the video and voice chat market. In addition, their Windows system on the mobile phone is greatly threatened by Apple's iOS and Android's Android system. They hope to attract users to use their mobile operating system through Skype, so they finally decided to spend a huge amount of money to complete the acquisition of Skype at a premium of more than 40%.
In fact, in addition to Microsoft, Google is also very interested in Skype. After all, Google is also lacking in social networks, and they also hope to integrate Skype into the GOS mobile phone system...
But in the competition between the two, Google was ultimately inferior to Microsoft in terms of bid, so it lost.
When Barron first invested in Skype, he planned to sell it to Microsoft at a high price in the future, and he did not have the idea of staying to develop it.
Because he knew that the results of his previous life showed that Skype was not suitable for integration into mobile phones. After Microsoft acquired Skype, it also tried hard to make such an attempt. However, Skype, which is eager to use p2p technology, has a very big disadvantage when used on mobile phones, that is, it consumes a lot of traffic.
In the end, Skype did not make any waves under Microsoft, and it was far behind in the mobile Internet era...
Having said that, they have launched the WoawChat APP. In the future, in the mobile Internet era, whether it is voice chat or video chat, WoawChat is more convenient than Skype.
Therefore, after comprehensive consideration, it is more appropriate to let Microsoft take over Skype now while the price is high.
Just after Microsoft took the initiative to negotiate the acquisition of Skype, it raised the price to US$9 billion. Seeing that this might be the limit of Microsoft's offer, DS Holdings and O2 Telecom finally agreed to the acquisition.
After selling Skype, DS Holdings (Cavendish Trust) will receive $5.85 billion in cash and Microsoft shares; O2 Telecom will receive $765 million in cash and shares. Everyone is happy.
Perhaps the only one who is a little depressed is the founding team of Skype, because some of them sold some of Skype's shares during the subprime mortgage crisis, and now they don't have many shares.
But the good thing is that they can continue to stay in Skype, and if Skype can develop in the future, they can still get certain equity incentives...
Of course, this is at most some psychological comfort. Baron knows that this possibility is unlikely.
It can be said that from the initial investment in Skype, to holding the company, then IPO, and finally selling it to Microsoft, DS Holdings completed the entire process of investment-launch. This was an extremely successful investment, which ultimately brought them rich returns.
After completing this sale, DS Holdings used cash to acquire the Microsoft shares that O2 Telecom obtained from the sale of Skype shares - for O2 Telecom, holding Microsoft shares is meaningless, it is better to get cash for the company's operations.
It is worth mentioning that because of the high price of selling the shares held in Skype this time, O2 Telecom's stock price has risen slightly, and their market value has increased by more than 765 million US dollars.
Barron knew that Microsoft's stock price would rise exponentially for quite some time afterwards, so they were not prepared to cash out these Microsoft shares immediately, and they would just keep them for the time being.
As for the cash they got, after acquiring O2 Telecom's Microsoft shares, the remaining part was all invested in the Caesar Fund.
In fact, compared with Skype, Barron is more concerned about map software.
After all, in the future mobile Internet era, map software can be said to be a basic application. Not only travel, but many applications need map software to provide services.
Among the current map applications, the most complete and well-known one is Google Maps.
And Apple has been trying its best to improve their Apple Maps.
In the current smartphone operating systems, Apple's iOS has Apple Maps, and Google's GOS has Google Maps. If Android does not want to rely on its competitors for future business in this area, then map applications are a must.
Therefore, they also acquired a number of online map companies including Poly9 to improve their Android maps.
Well, the map APP built into the Android system is called Android Maps, but the same core has another name, called Woaw Maps.
This company is a map company jointly invested by Android, Woaw and Digital Future Investment Company, and will provide map services for both Android and Woaw.
Although objectively speaking, the current Android maps are slightly behind Google maps, let alone Apple maps, map services are extremely important in future mobile Internet applications. Therefore, Android maps has invested a lot of money in various map optimizations on the one hand, and on the other hand, it will continue to acquire other online map service providers to supplement their map services.
