Does a Facebook acquisition of Skype make sense? In a word, Nope

There are, for businesses, only a few things on which you can depend. One, obviously, is that if you have a ton of money, there will always be rumors that you're on the prowl for new businesses to acquire. And, that, of course, is legitimate. What good does a pile of cash do you sitting in the bank? You have to, as they say, spend money to make money. And, buying somebody else's successful business is a great way to build your bottom line.

On the flip side, you can count on being a rumored acquisition target if you have a successful business that's not aggressively moving forward, whether that means you're not out acquiring other companies, or finding new ways to raise capital.

Skype, which this week was intimated as being a target of Facebook (as well a possible target of other unnamed companies), falls into that later category.

It has been busily adding features-like its very useful and popular Skype in the Classroom service that exited beta in March. It even made a nice acquisition in January with its pick up of Qik, which allows mobile users to share UGC across mobile devices (which cost it $121 million according to its March updated IPO filing with the SEC).

But the fact that it's been dawdling on its IPO just doesn't sit well with, well, anybody.

As one unnamed source told Reuters: "When a company is not going public and it has been on file for a long time, one way or another, something is going to happen."

And it has been a long time since Skype's initial filing in August, delayed in large part from its early-2011 target by the hiring in October of former Cisco exec Tony Bates as CEO in October.

The Wall Street Journal in January said a source told it that, "The intention is to go when Tony is ready and when the macroeconomic climate allows the company to go."

Of course it doesn't help that there are so many potential IPOs waiting in the wings, Facebook, for example, or business networking site LinkedIn.

Nor does it help that Skype really hasn't seen a great deal of development in its profitability. It told the SEC that it had revenues of $859.8 million in 2010, and reported operating profits of only $20.6 million, and a net loss of $7 million. Not exactly awe inspiring.

What purpose would a Facebook/Skype merger serve?

Does it really make sense for Facebook to lay out as much as $4 billion for a property that, like Facebook itself, has more users- upwards of 663 million have registered for the VoIP service-- than profit?

One of the biggest problems Skype faces is that it has fewer than 9 million paying customers; 654 milion of the users play on the free side. Worse, the company has seen declining ARPU, according to its filing, from its paying customers, from $102 in 2008 to $98 in 2009 and $97 in 2010.

Hmmm.

So, is Facebook really likely to buy Skype? As they say out here in the wilds of Michigan, "Son, that dog don't hunt."--Jim