Li Ka-Shing grabbing 5% of equity at Skype ?
Hum… I’ve been browsing my RSS feeds the whole afternoon, including my A-list bloggers, and I hadn’t yet stumbled on this piece of news, reported by Limvirak. It seems our free-lance journalist friend Jean Rognetta (I think he used to have a blog?) wrote a story yesterday in Les Echos, the French economical daily.
He says Hutchison Whampoa (owned by Asia’s most powerful man), the guys behind the “3” UMTS brand in Europe and a conglomerate of other businesses, is taking a 5% equity stake in Skype, valuing the company at at least 1 billion dollars. I haven’t paid 2 euros to glance at the article, nor have read the paper. So, is this true ?
Lim ponders: 1 billon dollars and 50 million users, that’s $20/user, or he supposes $500 per paying sub (SkypeIn or SkypeOut). We’re kind of far from the 3 billion valuation that floated over the summer, and the “Skype is not for sale” reported by Om & others this week.
