Featured Image: Ravi Sharma on Unsplash
Indian food delivery giant Zomato is set to acquire the entertainment ticketing business of financial services company Paytm for $244.1m (£186m/€219m).
Rumours of the acquisition were first published in June, with Zomato confirming the deal yesterday (Wednesday).
Patym’s entertainment ticketing business is used by customers in India to discover and purchase tickets for movies, sports and live performances. Tickets can currently be purchased by customers through the main Paytm app, two of its standalone platforms Paytym Insider and TicketNew, and via offline box office sales.
As part of the deal, Paytm’s flagship app will continue to host ticketing offerings for up to 12 months, and 280 of its employees will join Zomato.
“Our stated mission as an organisation is to build products and services that power India’s changing lifestyles. We believe, over the next decade and beyond, going-out experiences will continue to grow strongly in lockstep with overall growth in lifestyle and consumption,” said Deepinder Goyal, chief executive of Zomato in a Q&A on the acquisition.
“The proposed acquisition helps us add more scale and offer newer use-cases (like movie and sports ticketing) to our customers in this segment. It makes us more relevant for our customers which also gives us an opportunity to spin-off the business into a new app (we are going to call it District) which could be a game changer for each of these use cases given the need for a single brand as a destination in this segment.”
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