Rebirth of England.

Chapter 720 Selling Skype
As December approached, with sovereign debt crises breaking out in the Emirate of Dubai and Greece and the situation becoming increasingly serious, the most anticipated news was Microsoft's announcement that it would acquire Skype for US$12 billion.

Skype在2007年初上市的时候，市值超过了60亿美元，当时DS控股持有占比61.25%的Skype股票，拥有其70.13%的投票权；而O2电信则持有其8.5%的股份。

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 ratio to 65%.

In Baron's previous life, Microsoft acquired Skype for US$2011 billion in 85. However, because Skype's development was better at that time than in the original time and space, Microsoft had to pay an additional US$5 million for it, and finally completed the acquisition of Skype for US$90 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 that it hoped to use this Internet phone application to help its website users communicate when shopping online.

But the problem is that, as we all know, e-commerce companies cannot create popular social software - for example, China's Alibaba company, even after spending a lot of money, still has not created a successful social software.

The reason is that the users of e-commerce websites mostly communicate with each other in a stranger social mode, with very few contacts between them, and therefore cannot build their social network at all.

Social software like Skype is mainly for "socializing among acquaintances". You wouldn't always like to call strangers, right? Most of the people you can communicate with on the phone are still acquaintances.

Therefore, after eBay acquired Skype in the original time and space, it did not promote its development, but instead limited the stability of the social network among Skype users to a certain extent.

It is different now. After being invested by DS Group, they provided Skype with the funds it needed for its development, and O2 Telecom also helped them expand their user base.

Up to now, the number of Skype users worldwide has exceeded 3 million. Microsoft itself has shortcomings in communication technology, and they hope to make up for it by acquiring Skype. They are very optimistic about the development of the video and voice chat market, and their Windows system on mobile phones is under great threat from Apple's iOS and Android's Android system. They hope to use Skype to attract users to use their mobile operating system, 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 networking, and they also hope to integrate Skype into the GOS mobile phone system...

But in the competition between the two, Google's bid was ultimately inferior to Microsoft's and therefore lost.

When Barron first invested in Skype, his plan was to sell it to Microsoft at a high price in the future, and he had no intention of staying on 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 was eager to use p2p technology, had a very big disadvantage when used on mobile phones, which was the huge consumption of data traffic.

In the end, Skype didn’t make any waves under Microsoft and fell far behind in the era of mobile Internet…

Having said that, they have launched the WoawChat APP. In the future mobile Internet era, whether it is voice chat or video chat, WoawChat will be more convenient than Skype.

Therefore, after comprehensive consideration, it would be 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 and raised the price to US$90 billion, seeing that this might be the limit of Microsoft's offer, DS Holdings and O2 Telecom finally readily agreed to the acquisition.

After selling Skype, DS Holdings (Cavendish Trust) received $58.5 billion in cash and Microsoft shares, while O2 Telecom received $7.65 million in cash and shares. Everyone is happy. The only one who is a little depressed is the founding team of Skype, because some of them sold some of their Skype shares during the subprime mortgage crisis, and now they don't have many shares left.

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 just some psychological comfort at best. Barron knows that this possibility is unlikely.

It can be said that DS Holdings completed the entire process of investment-launch, from the initial investment in Skype, to controlling the company, then the IPO, and finally selling it to Microsoft. This was an extremely successful investment that ultimately brought them rich returns.

After completing the sale, DS Holdings used cash to purchase the Microsoft shares that O2 Telecom obtained from the sale of Skype shares - for O2 Telecom, there was no point in holding Microsoft shares, and it was better to get cash for the company's operations.

It is worth mentioning that because of the high price of selling its shares in Skype this time, O2 Telecom's share price has risen slightly, and the increase in their market value is even higher than the US$7.65 million.

Baron knew that Microsoft's stock price would rise exponentially over the next considerable period of time, so they were not going to cash in their Microsoft shares immediately and would just keep them for the time being.

As for the cash they received, after acquiring O2 Telecom's Microsoft shares, the remaining portion was all invested in the Caesar Fund.

In fact, compared to Skype, Barron is more concerned about map software.

After all, in the future era of mobile Internet, map software can be said to be a basic application. Not only travel, but many applications require map software to provide services.

Among the current map applications, the most complete and well-known one is Google Maps.

Apple has also been working hard to improve its Apple Maps.

Among the current smartphone operating systems, Apple's iOS has Apple Maps, and Google's GOS has Google Maps. So if Android companies do not want to rely on their competitors for future business in this area, then map applications are a must.

Therefore, they also acquired several online map companies, including Poly9, to improve their Android maps.

Well, the built-in map app in the Android system is called Android Maps, but with the same core, it also 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 to 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.

(End of this chapter)