ICQ, that instant messaging service that everybody used to use in the U.S. back in late late 1990s will be put up for sale for 300 million US.
If you hadn’t heard, AOL will be splitting from Time Warner and will once again become an independent company. This will be occurring on December 10, 2009. ICQ happens to be an AOL property currently.
Know that ICQ has a huge presence basically everywhere but the United States. It is widely used in Russia and China and has somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 million users. This is something that would be attractive to capitalize on for many internet companies looking to expand their user base.
AOL has internet properties in 40 countries (I bet you never knew they stretched so far) and they are sure to sell off a whole bunch of those – ICQ being one of them.
Will ICQ be snapped up by an American company like Google or Microsoft? Highly unlikely. Microsoft already has a huge worldwide presence with Live (formerly MSN) and Google has Google Talk and Gmail which is also worldwide.
What will most likely happen is that a non-U.S. internet company will make the purchase.
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