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Skype Acquires Sonorit, Camino Networks unit for $27 Million
[April 11, 2006]

Skype Acquires Sonorit, Camino Networks unit for $27 Million


Executive Editor
 

Skype (News - Alert), the global Internet communications company that is owned by eBay, has acquired Sonorit Holding AS and its subsidiary Camino Networks for approximately $27 million in stock, the company announced in a press release.



 

According to Skype’s co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, the acquisition was made to add online voice engineering experts to Skype’s own engineering team in order to help with the design and development of future versions of Skype. Based in San Francisco, with additional offices in Aalborg, , and Stockholm, , Sonorit is a start-up company building unique solutions for high quality speech processing, coding, and transmission for the next generation of Internet-based networks.


 

“We're excited about bringing the talented Camino Networks team to Skype,” said Niklas Zennstrom, Skype CEO and co-founder. “They will add considerable expertise to our own world-class technology team.”

 

Under the terms of the acquisition, Skype has agreed to acquire all outstanding securities of Sonorit for approximately 700,000 shares of eBay stock. eBay expects the acquisition to be immaterial to its full-year 2006 earnings per diluted share, as issued in connection with its first quarter earnings release on January 18, 2006.

 

The acquisition, which represents Skype’s first M&A transaction since being acquired by eBay last year, comes ironically on the same day as salesforce.com (News - Alert) also made its first-ever acquisition.

 

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.


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