By Elliot Turner
Late last night, TechCrunch broke the news that Cisco (CSCO) made a bid for Skype in an attempt to take over the company before it completes its IPO. This comes within a week of Google’s (GOOG) launch of Google Calls, before the blogosphere could sort out whether Google Calls is a “Skype-killer” or just merely a nuisance (although the nuisance argument had been gaining momentum). Barring an acquisition, Skype is one of the key players in this fall’s hot slate of upcoming IPOs.
This wouldn’t be the first brush with big cap tech interest, as Skype had been operating under eBay’s (EBAY) ownership from 2005 to 2009. eBay bought Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion and sold most of the company at an estimated valuation of $2.75 billion to a group of private equity investors in 2009. Ebay, to this date, maintains a 35% ownership interest.
Cisco, as a diversified networking powerhouse, with hardware, software and networking operations makes for an interesting potential acquirer. In their recent bummer of an earnings release, Cisco did in fact elicit some pockets of optimism in their plan to hire another 3,000 employees in the face of “unusual uncertainty” and a buyout of Skype would certainly fit the bill as a move to “embrace uncertainty.” Skype insiders had been hoping for a $5 billion initial public offering, and it’s conceivable that in order to seriously consider Cisco’s bid, it would have to at minimum match that $5 billion figure. With somewhere around $40 billion in cash, or cash equivalents, that should not be all that difficult for this tech behemoth to do.
With word of Cisco’s interest, now is a good time to dig into the Skype Form s-1 IPO Registration Statement for some additional information that could shed some
