Sold, Finally: eBay Ditches 65 Percent of Skype for $1.9 Billion

You can now formally call off eBay’s efforts to spin off Skype–not that many people took them seriously to begin with. The company has sold off 65 percent of its internet telephony business to a consortium of private investors for $1.9 billion.

The deal puts Skype’s overall value at $2.75 billion, a bit more than the $2.6 billion eBay paid for the company in 2005. That current value is about five times the unit’s 2008 revenue of $550 million.

Skype’s new owners: Silver Lake, the Silicon Valley-based private equity group; Index ventures, the London-based VC firm; Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen’s new Andreessen Horowitz fund; and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Here’s the press release.