Sunday, October 6, 2013

ENTREPRENEUR/STARTUP SPECIAL...Startup of the Year BookMyShow


Startup of the Year BookMyShow

THE  ET AWARD SEEKS TO
recognise a startup which has the potential to rapidly establish itself as an innovative and financially successful company
 
He Proves All Weekdays, Not Just Fridays, are Blockbusters

The year 2013 has proved to be a watershed for Ashish Hemrajani, 38, and his team at BookMyShow. In July this year, India’s most popular ticketing website signed a five-year pact with PVR Cinemas to sell the multiplex chain’s tickets on its portal. This one deal is estimated to yield revenues of 1,000 crore for the company, which has been chosen as the Startup of the Year 2013.
“We feel very privileged,” said Hemrajani, founder and CEO of Bigtree Entertainment, the holding company of BookMyShow. “This award had a heavyweight jury, and if they think we are worthy, it is a big validation for us.”
Earlier this year, Bigtree acquired
Ticketgreen.com, a rival with a large footprint in southern India, cementing BookMyShow’s near-monopolistic stature as India’s largest entertainment ticketing portal.
A venture that initially started out as just another movie ticket portal, BookMyShow now offers the Indian consumer a choice of tickets ranging from the Indian Premier League to the Formula One India Grand Prix, music concerts, plays and stand-up comic acts. BookMyShow has expanded operations to global markets, including New Zealand, Australia and the UK, boosting investor interest in the five-year-old venture. In August 2012, Accel Partners, which counts companies such as Facebook in its portfolio, invested 100 crore in the company to buy an undisclosed stake through a combination of primary share issue and sale of shares by Network18, one of the investors. The deal reportedly valued the Mumbai-based BookMyShow at close to 400 crore.
For Hemrajani, the startup journey began while he was on vacation nearly a decade ago. Intrigued by the variety of leisuretime options that the Internet threw up while holidaying in South Africa, the 24-year-old trawled the sites of international ticketing companies such as Fandango and Ticketmaster.
Back home in India, Hemrajani quit his job at ad firm J Walter Thompson to launch Bigtree Entertainment. But he could not sustain the fledgling venture after the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. He managed to stay afloat by running call centres and developing software for cinemas. He relaunched the brand as
BookMyShow.com in 2007, when he saw a revival in the consumer market.
“It was the second coming,” said the entrepreneur, who expects to sell 100 million tickets a year by 2016-17. He estimates that around 4 billion movie tickets are sold in India every year, and that 90% of the tickets bought online are purchased on his portal. BookMyShow offers tickets for over 2,000 screens in tie-up with cinema chains such as Inox, Fame and Big Cinemas, and theatre venues such as Prithvi, India Habitat Centre and Rangashankara. Hemrajani said the company earns 40% of its revenues from non-movie events, including Formula 1, Indian Premier League and football and live music concerts. The focus now for BookMyShow is India’s much-neglected tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Given the low Internet penetration in the country, the company will not simply stop at offering tickets online. The risk capital funding is being used to sign on single-screen cinemas and events in small towns and cities, and building technologies around mobile payments and applications. “Mobile is a huge thrust,” said Hemrajani, who expects one-third of revenues through mobile transactions in the near future.
A competitive sailor, Hemrajani said “the best thing about this award was that it was not in anybody’s hands”.

ET130926

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