- The company reported a 30 percent increase in operational revenues at Rs. 391 crore in the financial year 2018.
- BookMyShow was founded in 1999 as Bigtree Entertainment by Ashish Hemrajani, Rajesh Balpande, and Parikshit Dhar.
Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, Investment banking major Goldman Sachs and Private equity major General Atlantic are lining up for a 10-12 percent stake in BookMyShow. The deal is likely to take the online ticketing major’s valuation pas the $1 billion mark.
Marching towards Unicorn
SAIF PArtners who own 5.6 percent stake will be completely exiting the entity and Accel India will exiting partially.
The negotiations have reached an advanced stage and a deal is expected to be closed in the upcoming few weeks taking its size at over $100 million.
One of the sources mentioned, “General Atlantic is currently the frontrunner for the deal and it will value BookMyShow at around $1.1 billion.”
SAIF is exiting because of its conflict with its holding in Paytm which has emerged as a major competitor to BookMyShow whose monopoly was broken in 2016. SAIF will make over four times return on its investment while Accel is expected to make more and retain a large part of its stake.
Ashish Hemrajani
source:- the economic times
History of BookMyShow
BookMyShow was founded in 1999 as Bigtree Entertainment by Ashish Hemrajani, Rajesh Balpande and Parikshit Dhar with initially focusing on helping the theatres in managing their inventory and then started selling tickets online with the launch of BookMyShow. After that company has scaled up significantly and is now selling 18-20 million tickets a month. Despite Paytm emerging as a strong competitor due to its aggressive cashback, BookMyShow continued to hold his ground and grow.
The company has aggressively expanded to non-movie ticketing and live events, which includes stand-up comedy, concerts and sports shows. These businesses now account of over one-third of the company’s revenue, growing faster than the movie ticketing business. Besides selling tickets of cash-rich Indian Premier League, the company is co-promoting basketball in India with a tie-up with US-based NBA.
Recently, the company invested in payments company AtomX in order to enable the cashless payments at its events and has been promoting fantasy game platform Fantain. The company reported a 30 percent increase in operational revenues at Rs. 391 crore in the financial year 2018 while next losses increased by 16.5 percent to Rs. 162 crore as the company invested in non-movie business.
As the reports suggest the deal is likely to be closed and it will push the valuation of BookMyShow past the $1 billion mark which means Indian Startup Community will have another unicorn.
#bookmyshow #unicorn
