2009-10-25

Quarterly results Skype

Skype continues its steady growth, but the financials don’t convince me!

Skype to Skype minutes grew quite well, more than 8%. However, this doesn’t generate direct revenue. The revenue comes mainly from people calling fixed or mobile lines, therefore from SkypeOut.SkypeOut minutes grew by some 3%. But, when looking at the slope of the curve, paid minutes seem to reach some saturation level, meaning that the paying user base is slowly reaching a kind of maximum.

This is reflected in the revenues, although the graph in dollars shows an increase of about 8%! Indeed, 80% of the revenue of Skype is coming from outside the USA. Therefore, the weakness of the dollar or the strength of the euro and other currencies has a positive impact on the dollar revenue.Recalculating the financial growth of Skype in euros, it is only a 3% growth. After all, this is really quite good: very few businesses can show such a growth in only one quarter. But, what concerns me is the slowing down of the growth of SkypeOut minutes! Something has to be done on that side!

2009-10-05

And ... again a million

Only three weeks, and the second time this year that Skype adds a million concurrent users online in only 3 weeks, (this is a record speed) and also the fifth million milestone this year, another absolute record. And the growth goes on despite competing products, lawsuits, new owners, eBay, Police and intelligence agencies threats and unhappiness, ...
I am really interested to see the quarterly results of Skype within eBay, and perhaps one of my previous earnings predictions will be way too low.