India’s leading online tickets booking portal ‘Book My Show’ now acquired the Hyderabad-based regional portal ‘MastiTickets’, a two-year-old startup. Mergers, acquisitions and partnerships became quite a usual way to survive in this competitive industry.

Since its beginning, Book My Show has been earning its successful shares in markets with amusing designing of the app, payments through wallet options, and absolutely unbelievable discounts on tickets during every new seasonal release.

Though the amount of the deal is not disclosed, sources claim that the whole payment was in cash, all at once. 

And it is believed that the main idea behind acquiring this mini ticketing company is to target the regional markets with special emphasis on Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Regional markets easily boast of competing with the conventional Mumbai-based film industry in terms of output, revenue and profits from films.

However, BookMyShow already has more than 530 screens distributed throughout the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. MastiTickets has a presence over 12 screens in the two major markets. With the acquisition, BookMyShow will become a major player in these two states as well.

MastiTickets was founded by Ravi Narla in 2014. Similar to BookMyShow, it also enables users to book tickets for movies through its website, a dedicated mobile app and a mobile site.

Earlier, Book My Show acquired the Chennai-based online ticketing major TicketGreen in 2011, a social media analytics startup called Eventifier in 2015 and, it had bought Chennai-based fan relationship management or FRM solutions provider ‘Fantain Sports’ in 2016.

Network 18, BookMyShow’s largest investor in an interview said that the company has sold over 100 million tickets in 2016 and expects to double the growth in the coming year. This goal can only be achieved by focusing on regional markets, which has risen in value and occupancy rates over the last few years. In July last year, the company raised Rs 550 crores led by Stripes Group in a series of investment.

According to the July 2016 statistics, BookMyShow is priced at over Rs 3000 crores. The online ticket booking market in India is on the rise. BookMyShow was launched by three founders, Ashish Hemrajani, Parikshit Dar and Rajesh Balpande in 1999.