Analyzing Skype's Q2, Updated Financial Model

Jason Jones was kind enough to update our Skype model with last night's Q2 results.  Feel free to view here:

Key points:

• Skype's revenue and registered users continue to grow nicely year-over-year, up 105% and 95% respectively.  With $90 million of revenue in Q2, the company is now closing in on a $400 million run-rate.  The bad news is that revenue is likely a lagging indicator, and Skype's usage is flattening.
• Skype-to-Skype minutes were flat year-over-year, suggesting that the market for PC-to-PC calls has largely been tapped.  This will always be a niche market, so this isn't surprising.
• Skype's Skype-to-Telephone minutes increased 53% year-over-year, but this was a drastic slowdown from the 131% growth in Q1.  This explains why Skype is desperately casting around for other sources of revenue (e.g., the ludicrous SkypeFind and SkypePrime).

In my opinion, Skype has lost focus, allowing other companies to capture markets it should have owned (Google's new acquisition Grand Central, for example).  Skype has yet to roll out a satisfactory small-business solution (main number, PBX, extensions, etc.) and has yet to penetrate the much larger phone-to-phone market.  Skype's forays into community and commerce, meanwhile, smack of the core expertise of its parent, eBay, which has no strategic reason for owning the company.  eBay should sell Skype to Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google, and focus on its core commerce business.

Comments

[CashForFlow]

Skype is unreliable in comparison to a cellphone, and just ridiculous in comparison to a landline. Skype calls are almost clear like a cellphone or jumbled static depending on your connection speed and general traffic on the Internet. Only Verizon can pull this off with a fiber connections to every customer, and it still doesn't touch a landline.

[HowDoYouSpellCashedOut]

>In my opinion, Skype has lost focus, allowing other companies to capture markets >it should have owned (Google's new acquisition Grand Central, for example). Skype >has yet to roll out a satisfactory small-business solution (main number, PBX, >extensions, etc.) and has yet to penetrate the much larger phone-to-phone market.

No shit, Sherlock! Doesn't that scream "CASHED OUT" to you, Henry? If yet-another demonstration is needed that public shareholder capital should never be used to pay way-over-the-top valuations to "promising" companies, this is it. You have already paid out the next, what, 20 years of "prospective" earnings to the founders. So what rational reason do they have to actually deliver you those earnings?

So just like any rational person, they move on to their next adventure, Joost. In a mighty trick, they still seem vaguely employed by Skype, and eBay didn't even get the actual p2p technology behind Skype, which is being reused at Joost, without bringing a dime of benefit to ebay, of course. I hear Joost is available for only $2 billion, looking for the next set of public suckerholders. Ms. Whitman, call your investment bankers, fast!

[anon]

Also interesting to note is the number of concurrent users Skype reports when you run the software -- I watched it to grow from 1 million to peak 9 million in around January 2007.

However, ever since then I've seen it steadily decline and it's now back to average 8 million concurrent users per day range, it's definitely not pushing beyond 9 million and nowhere close to the next milestone of 10 million any time soon.

Tapped out is correct.

[Tiago]

I am sometimes under the impression that all recent financial advice here boils down to:

"Company X should split, divest, go private. The Google alternative".

This is not a rhetorichal question, but something I really don't know: do writers here disclose their stock holdings?

[jld]

Why are companies so idiotic that they overpay for an asset and then start doing all sorts of stupid stuff to it?

[Reality check]

@Tiago: Henry Blodget (blog's author) was charged with civil securities fraud by the SEC in 2003 for actions during the first bubble.

Like many others charged from that era, he settled without admitting or denying the allegations and was subsequently banned from the securities industry for life.

So I'm not sure what you expect, quality- and ethics- wise from this blog.