As non-executive chairman of Skype, he will serve mostly in an advisory role, Durzy said. Zennstrom decided to step down as CEO of his own accord in order to focus on other projects. The Skype management changes aren’t due to the unit’s financial performance, said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy. In August, Skype suffered a widely publicized and embarrassing outage that lasted about two days and left millions of users fuming worldwide and many openly questioning the stability of Skype’s technical platform. However, eBay CEO and President Meg Whitman, discussing the second quarter’s financial results in a conference call in July, said that, despite its revenue and user growth, Skype hasn’t achieved the desired level of “user activity.” Meanwhile, registered user accounts grew 94 percent to 220 million. In the second quarter, ended June 30, Skype’s net revenue hit $90 million, up 103 percent compared with the same quarter in 2006. Gomez will return to the eBay fold as a senior vice president for corporate affairs.ĮBay acquired Skype, a provider of Internet telephony services, in October 2005 for approximately US$2.6 billion, plus an optional amount dependent on the achievement of certain goals.įrom the start, many have questioned the logic behind the acquisition, suggesting that eBay would have a difficult time recouping its investment and leveraging Skype to boost interactions eBay among buyers and sellers. After serving as general manager of Skype North America and later Skype Chief Marketing Officer, he was named its president in December 2006. Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s Chief Strategy Officer, is stepping in as interim CEO until a permanent replacement is hired, eBay announced Monday.Īlso out is Henry Gomez, who has been with eBay since 2000 and joined Skype about two years ago. Skype’s co-founder Niklas Zennstrom has handed over his CEO title to become non-executive chairman of the board of directors of this eBay unit, whose impact on its parent company remains an open question.
0 kommentar(er)
