Skype was spun off from Ebay last year and they are now filing for a $100 million IPO. Depending on how you define a telecom service provider, Skype may well be the largest on the planet, with 560 million registered users.
Even with that scale, Skype says there’s still plenty of room for growth in their recent IPO filing. Skype will be listed on NASDAQ. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined. Here’s some interesting insight into the behemoth that is Skype (all numbers are as of June 30, 2010):
- Of the 560 million users, only about 8.1 million actually pay for the service. The rest use the free features, or signed up for the service but don’t use it at all.
- ARPU for those 8.1 million users stands at $96/year.
- On average, 124 million users access Skype in some fashion each month.
- For the first six months of 2010, Skype racked up 95 billion minutes of voice and video usage for Skype-to-Skype calls.
- Forty percent of those 95 billion minutes of use were in the form of video calling.
- Skype is reporting $406.2 million in net revenue and $13.1 million in net income for the first six months of this year.
- Skype had expenses of $343.8 million in 2009 to settle its legal fight with original founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, leading the way for the company to continue to use its peer-to-peer platform.
What would be really interesting to know is what percentage of those 95 billion minutes represents minutes lost from the PSTN, or are they incremental minutes gained by Skype that would have never been used on the PSTN anyway?
