Skype will be spun off in an IPO early next year, eBay announced Tuesday, acknowledging that the internet telephone company the auction giant acquired three years ago for $2.6 billion was a bad fit.

"Skype is a great stand-alone business with strong fundamentals and accelerating momentum," eBay President and CEO John Donahoe said in a statement. "But it's clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal. We believe operating Skype as a stand-alone publicly traded company is the best path for maximizing its potential."

Investors seemed pleased by the prospect, pushing up eBay shares more than 3 percent in after-hours trading. But analysts questioned both the timing of the move and Skype's potential valuation.

Donahoe telegraphed his intentions to unload Skype earlier this year — even using the same "great stand-alone business" phrase to describe Skype to analysts during his Q4 call. But the use of an IPO — de rigeur in the heady days before the dot-com bust but not so much these days — comes as something of a surprise.

The news follows by a day word that eBay had sold StumbleUpon back to its owners, and speculation by the New York Times on Saturday that eBay might sell Skype back to its founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, as well.

The two initiatives herald in a new, post-Meg Whitman era strategy of concentrating on eBay's core, retail-oriented businesses. "... separating Skype will allow eBay to focus entirely on our two core growth engines — e-commerce and online payments — and deliver long-term value to our stockholders," Donahoe said.

It also signals confidence by a major Silicon Valley company about what market conditions will be in about 12 months after a year in which IPO activity virtually ground to a halt. The precise timing of the Skype IPO would be based on market conditions, the company said, but it intends to complete the offering in the first half of 2010.

EBay acknowledged some time ago that it had overpaid for Skype by about $1 billion — the purchase price was $2.6 billion but the New York Times has reported the total cost reached $3.1 billion after bonus payouts to founders. It took a took a $1.4 billion charge on purchase price in early 2007.

Purchase price aside, the acquisition never seemed to make much sense. One of the initial rationales behind the purchase — a "click to talk" feature integrated in eBay auction pages to give buyers and sellers a more immediate means of communicating with each other — never caught on and was abandoned. After that, with credible synergies elusive, the only justification for owning a non-strategic property like Skype would be if it added significantly to the bottom line.

It doesn't. Ebay posted $8.54 billion in revenue last year, to which Skype contributed a paltry $550 million — about $1.35 per user. The basic service, calls over the internet to other Skype users, is free. Revenue comes from such up-charges as calls out to the normal telephone system, a rented telephone number so non-Skype members can call in and voicemail-to-text conversion.

Yet, Skype has enormous global street cred with its millions of users, and is the world's leading international telephone company. With the ultra portability of mobile phones and Wi-Fi connectivity become increasingly ubiquitous, VoIP is moving far away from the geeky confines of its headset-and-desktop roots. The company has recently been making aggressive moves to increase its already significant market share and, with that, revenue opportunities.

Last month, it announced an app for the iPhone and Blackberry and an initiative to move into the enterprise VoIP space. Downloads for the Skype iPhone app passed the 2 million mark in about a week, and a quarter of them were new users.

It's anybody's guess what additional revenue-producing plans eBay might have between now and the time of the IPO, but a valuation based on even a generous multiple-of-earnings alone would fall far short of what it paid. EBay says it expects Skype to top $1 billion in revenues in 2011.

Analysts were not convinced market conditions would improve sufficiently by early 2010 and questioned whether even the expansion into wireless handsets would provide significant new revenue.

"The very first thing that I have to say is market conditions currently would not support an IPO of Skype in our opinion," Commresearch analyst Gregory Lundberg told Reuters. "2010

will be equally questionable unless the business completely changes course with the launch of the Blackberry and iPhone applications."

"The issue is the iPhone itself won't change that user base because

AT&T won't let it run on its network, only when it has connection to a Wi-Fi hotspot," Lundberg said. "That same sort of control is being exercised in

Europe by some carriers and that's a major barrier to uptake."

Update: This post was updated with details throughout and corrected purchase price references from the original post.

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