Meg Whitman may have revealed the way Skype can hit some of the financial targets eBay set for it in an interview with Time.
Part of eBay’s deal with Skype in acquiring the VoIP provider allows for a bonus beyond the $2.6 billion cash and stock deal announced recently. Should Skype hit three unspecified financial targets by 2009, eBay will enrich certain Skype shareholders by as much as $1.5 billion more dollars.
How Skype might get there has been a mystery, one that may not be revealed unless it hit those targets and eBay puts that in their SEC filings. But it could be that PayPal, the payment processor acquired by eBay three years ago for $1.5 billion, will be the conduit through which Skype delivers on the deal.
ZDNet’s Russell Shaw pointed to the Time interview and extracted this exchange, which could show how eBay will see the Skype investment partially recouped:
TIME: eBay has about 157 million users worldwide and Skype will soon have 57 million, but the overlap is only about 1%. How will you combine the two communities?
WHITMAN: The other figure I’d lay on there is the 79 million people who have PayPal. Maybe we’ll introduce every Skype user to a PayPal account, and vice versa, in a thoughtful way. We want to make sure we don’t take away from the destiny of each business, but we’d like one plus one plus one to equal five.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
