Microsoft Bought Skype for $8.5 Billion

Microsoft Bought Skype for $8.5 Billion

Skype now officially belongs to Microsoft. The deal was completed on Monday morning and the acquisition set Microsoft back $8.5 billion. Now the question arises whether this will be a good investment for the huge corporation or not. Skype is not exactly very profitable at the moment, as the company lost $6.9 million overall and is currently having debts of $686 million. And all this despite last year’s revenues of $860 million and operating profits of $264 million.


Microsoft however is confident that what they did was a wise decision and announced their plans to integrate Skype into their systems and devices like the Windows Phone, Xbox and Kinect, Outlook, or Lync. After all, they did spend a fortune on the VoIP giant. This is actually the most expensive Microsoft acquisition in decades.
What probably lured Microsoft into shelling out this money was Skype’s immense user base: 663 million users. Approximately 145 million of them use Skype every month and some 8.8 million are paying customers. According to Microsoft, the number of people who use Skype regularly is of 170 million. Hopefully these figures will grow even more under the new management.

Microsoft Bought Skype for $8.5 Billion