Since its spin-off from Time Warner, AOL has been trying to remake itself and is currently selling its non-core assets, including ICQ.

ICQ, whose name derived from the homophonic phrase “I seek you”, has 42 million active users. Among them, 18.5 million are from Russia, said Wednesday’s Beijing News.

Tencent’s QQ service, a Chinese answer to ICQ, is known for its reigning popularity on the Chinese mainland, which is reported to have over 300 million registered accounts.

Source : Konaxis

Several sources said, ICQ’s bidding price was about 200 million U.S. dollars, but only one potential acquirer’s bid was higher than this amount. AOL spokesman declined to comment.

In November last year, there was news that AOL transferred its attention to content and advertising business, the company was planning to sell ICQ. Subsequently it was report that the bid for ICQ was by the traditional way, that is, the potential acquirer submitted bid to investment bank Allen & CO and Morgan Stanley hired by AOL.

The sources indicated that the potential acquirer had completed quotes, and AOL selected 4 buyers. It is said that a number of bidders were international Internet companies. ICQ has around the world 40 million to 50 million active users, outside the United States markets, especially in Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe and Israel and other countries and regions it is still popular.

Industry insiders speculated international companies which might bid including Russia Investment Group, Facebook’s investor DST, China’s Tencent, South African media giant-Naspers, the largest Internet portal Seznam of the Czech Republic and Russia’s largest search engine- Yandex. There are also people who think that Google is a major ICQ bidder.

No matter what price ICQ eventually will be sold at, it will be much lower than the price of AOL’s purchasing ICQ in 1998. ICQ was once the Internet’s most popular instant messaging tool, and AOL’s price then was 287 million U.S. dollars, moreover, the terms of the acquisition also included the extra fees of 120 million dollars offerred to ICQ team.

However, ICQ in the United States have failed to catch up with Microsoft, Yahoo and Google’s similar services. In addition, Facebook, and Twitter are rapidly rising in the Internet communications. AOL’s AIM and the performance is better than ICQ, and was once the most popular instant messaging services in the United States.

ICQ was originally developed by an Israeli start-ups company called Mirabilis. ICQ’s current headquarters remains in Israel, having about 100 employees and be able to achieve profitability.