The online ticketing business in India seems to be heating up. After Chinese ecommerce major Alibaba picked up a majority stake in TicketNew, Alibaba’s first Indian bet Paytm is picking up a majority stake in Insider.in. Run by OML Entertainment, Insider.in is an online ticket booking platform for events.
According to a report by The Ken, Paytm will be paying around Rs 35 crore to pick up a majority stake in the company.
Dominated by BookMyShow, Insider ranks a distant number two in the ticketing space for events, while BMS does both movies and tickets.
Paytm entered the ticketing space in March 2016 and currently facilitates booking across 550 cities in India. But it seems to be making a bigger bet in this space. With the acquisition of Insider, Paytm will directly compete with BookMyShow.
A Paytm spokesperson told The Ken, “Vast majority of Indians haven’t bought their movie tickets online. Given Paytm’s massive footprint, we see this as a big opportunity to bring more and more users and theatres online. Paytm movies has emerged as the country’s fastest growing online movie ticketing platform within a year of launch. We are now regularly ticketing more than 20% of total box office for all major releases.”
The Times of India earlier reported that Paytm might pump in $30 million into Insider.in to get a pie of the events business.
If the talks go through, the Alibaba-backed company will get a majority stake in Insider.in and not in its parent company, the report stated.
According to The Ken, the total box office collection in India is around $2 billion – online and offline combined.
As per most industry players, online accounts for anywhere between 10-15%. Ken reports that BookMyShow claims to have sold about 100 million tickets in 2016. For the same period, Paytm claimed that it sold 25 million tickets.
Paytm says that the addressable market for tickets sold online is anywhere near 500 million tickets every year and hopes to double its ticket sales this year.