Food delivery giant Zomato on Wednesday completed the acquisition of fintech major Paytm’s entertainment ticketing business, Paytm Insider for Rs 2,048 crore. Paytm’s ticketing business includes selling tickets for movies, sports events, and live shows.
In this deal, Zomato has taken over Orbgen Technologies Pvt Ltd (OTPL), a company that sells movie tickets, for Rs 1,264.6 crore. It has also bought Wasteland Entertainment Pvt Ltd, which sells tickets for events, for Rs 783.8 crore.
Paytm mentioned that about 280 employees from its ticketing division will move to Zomato as part of this deal. The company also said that this deal will bring in profits and strengthen its finances.
Paytm added that selling the ticketing business will allow it to focus more on its main areas—payments and financial services. The company is confident that it can make up for the lost revenue by growing its core business.
Zomato’s CEO, Deepinder Goyal, told shareholders, “The proposed acquisition helps us add more scale and offer newer use-cases (like movie and sports ticketing) to our customers in this segment”.
Zomato plans to launch a new app called ‘District’ to manage this ticketing business. It believes that this purchase will make its platform more useful for customers and provide a chance to create a separate app for ticketing.
