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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”.
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