Word: billion
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just when eBay thought it had figured out a way to unload a majority interest in Skype, along came the Scandinavian founders of the world's biggest provider of Internet telephony to sink the $1.9 billion deal - and perhaps Skype itself...
...Friis are suing eBay, based in San Jose, Calif., and a consortium of investors that includes private-equity firms Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz (co-owned by Netscape's Marc Andreessen) and the Canada Pension Plan over the breach of a software-licensing agreement. (Read "eBay Sells Skype for $1.9 Billion...
Wait a second: eBay bought Luxembourg-based Skype from the Scandinavians for $2.6 billion in 2005 - a lofty sum that made the heads of many in Silicon Valley spin. Can the founders now really hope to block the resale of Skype by pulling the technology on which it runs? "People are puzzled about how this happened," says analyst Stephan Beckert with Washington-based TeleGeography Research. "One thing I can say: You don't want to mess with Zennstrom...
...Meanwhile, HSBC's Asia businesses continue to thrive. In the first half of 2009, its regional operations notched a pretax profit of $4.5 billion, more than half of it coming from Hong Kong alone. The bank is also continuing to expand in Asia. In China, where HSBC already has the largest branch network of any foreign bank, it is considering an initial public offering of stock on the Shanghai exchange. In May, HSBC completed its acquisition of Bank Ekonomi in Indonesia, almost doubling its number of outlets in that country...
Iran sits atop mammoth energy reserves -about 136 billion bbl. of oil and some 14 trillion cu m of natural gas. But because its refineries are too few and too old, the country refines just two-thirds of the gas it needs to keep its economy working and its 65 million people lit, driving and heated. The remaining third - about 120,000 bbl. a day - has to be imported...