To take on BookMyShow, Paytm acquires Alibaba-owned TicketNew for $40 Mn

When it comes to online movie ticketing sales SoftBank and Alibaba-backed Paytm has been growing at a fast pace. To take on its rival BookMyShow, the Noida-based company has acquired TicketNew--a Chennai-based online movie ticketing platform.

Alibaba Pictures, an affiliate of Alibaba Group, which holds the majority stake in TicketNew has sold it to Paytm Entertainment, run by the online payments major for $40 million.

Last year, Alibaba Pictures had acquired a majority stake in the South Indian online ticketing platform for an undisclosed amount. Post acquisition, the Chinese tech giant also committed to investing Rs 120 crore in the ticketing portal.

This will be the second acquisition for Paytm in ticketing segment within a year. In June last year, Paytm which ventured into ticketing space two years ago acquired a majority stake in Mumbai-based ticketing platform Insider.in.

With the acquisition of TicketNew, the One97 Communications-owned company will become a close competitor of BookMyShow. The 19-year-old company has so far dominated the online movie ticketing space but Paytm has been cannibalising its market share on the back of discounting and cashback.

In March 2016, Paytm made a nationwide foray into the online movie ticket segment with a partnership with PVR Cinemas. Since then it aggressively swelled its business and has wielded partnership with more than 4,000 movie screens across multiplex brands including PVR, INOX, and Cinepolis among various regional chains.

Last month Paytm had introduced movie ticket loyalty programme called Movie Pass. The unique loyalty programme allows paying subscribers to watch movies at a discounted rate.

The Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led company had registered a little over 2X growth in 2017 by selling out 52 million movie tickets. In 2016, it claimed to sell about 26 million tickets. Importantly, BookMyShow did not reveal any figure in 2017 but it claimed to sell over 100 million tickets in 2016.

Currently, the movie ticketing market in India is estimated to be worth nearly $2 billion and has been growing at 10 per cent annually. Notably, the online movie ticketing market is only 15 per cent of the overall domestic market.

Paytm has been increasing its online penetration and identified movie ticketing as the next $1 billion gross transactions vertical, besides travel.

The development was reported by Business Standard.