eBay Inc is acquiring a controlling stake in South Korean online retailer Gmarket Inc for $413 million, at a 32.5-per cent premium, news service eDaily reported on Monday, at $24 a share for a toatal deal value of $413 million. Gmarket's latest closing of $18.12 a share.

eBay is acquiring the Gmarket stake from its current top shareholder Interpark Corp, and the Korean firm's chairman, Ki Hyung Lee.

The long-discussed deal would help US online auctioneer eBay emerge as a dominant player in South Korea's customer-to-customer online market by taking control of its key competitor. (See: eBay seeks stake in South Korean online retailer Gmarket).

eBay had ben in discussions with Interpark, the largest shareholder in Gmarket, directly held a 29.3-per cent stake while and Lee directly held 7.3 per cent as of December 2008. Yahoo is also a shareholder in the Korean entity with a 10-per cent stake.

The final contract would be signed on Wednesday.

Nasdaq-listed Gmarket runs customer-to-customer marketplaces and has more than 10 million registered users in South Korea. It competes with eBay's South Korean unit, Internet Auction Co.

eBay has won conditional approval from South Korea's antitrust watchdog on the Gmarket deal. When combined, Gmarket and Internet Auction would have 87 per cent of the country's online customer-to-customer market.

Gmarket was founded in 1999 by Ki Hyung Lee as "AuctionWeb" and "ShoppingMall", part of a larger personal site. Originally, the site belonged to Online Market Group, a consulting firm.

The company went public in 2006 and made an offering of 9,119,565 American Depositary Shares on NASDAQ. The initial price was $15.25. In March this year, Interpark pulled out of a plan to sell its Gmarket stake due to what it called unstable financial markets in South Korea and abroad.

Meanwhile, there were reports that eBay is desperate to get rid of its web telephone service Skype, which it bought in 2005, even willing to settle for half of the $3.1 billion it originally paid. (See: eBay looking to sell Skype to original owners: report).

Selling Skype would solve a number of problems for eBay, including generating cash for its United States operations.

eBay had $3.19 billion in cash at the end of last year, but $2.8 billion of that money is overseas and would be subject to repatriation taxes if the company were to invest it in its ailing US e-commerce marketplace, according to analysts.

Founders interested in Skype
Interestingly, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders and creators of Skype,  are seeking a private equity firm to help them buy back Skype they sold in 2005 for $2.6 billion.

Later on they also received bonus payouts that increased the final price to $3.1 billion. Since then, Zennstrom, a native of Sweden, and Friis, of Denmark, have created the venture capital firm Atomico and backed the online video service Joost, both based in London.

Skype has more than 405 million registered users, up from 53 million when eBay bought it, and the service had $145 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Calls are free between Skype users, and rates are a few pennies a minute for international calls to non-Skype users; the low cost has helped the company gain 8 per cent of the world's international calling minutes, according to TeleGeography, a market research firm.

Analysts say they believe that eBay is looking for a price of at least $1.7 billion, the value of Skype on its balance sheet after the company wrote off a portion of the acquisition in 2007.