According to a blog post on the Skype blog this morning, the company has begun taking the first steps to going public, filing a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing is the first step in paving the way for the company to make an initial public offering or IPO.
Skype is a “software-based communications platform” that’s been around since 2003 and has recently spread beyond computers to mobile phones and even Internet-connected televisions.
The filing states a “proposed maximum aggregate offering price” of $100 million dollars, but has not yet gone into effect.
Skype currently has 124 million “connected users” who “placed 95 billion calling minutes over Skype in the first half of 2010, approximately 40% of which were video.” According to the registration statement, the company has grown to 560 million registered users (even more than Facebook’s recent 500-million-user milestone) and over the past year, the average monthly paying users grew from 6.6 million to 8.1 million. In the first six months of 2010, the company generated $406.2 million of net revenues as compared to $324.8 million during the same period in 2009.
The company was valued last year at $2.75 billion when it was sold to investors.
