eBay to sell Skype in stock market flotation

After our look this morning at speculation that Skype's founders Niklaus Zennstrom and Janus Friis were looking for capital to buy back the company they originally sold to eBay back in 2005, the auction giant has announced plans to float Skype on the stock market. 

Although it originally paid 2.6 billion dollars for the Internet telephony company, which is now responsible for 8% of the world's international telephone calls, eBay has not yet managed to create any useful synergies between its original auction business model and VoIP.

A public share offering is pencilled in for the first half of 2010, and has been priced at around one billion dollars, representing a considerable loss for eBay based on the 2005 price.