Five major film and television companies "jointly invest" Taobao film giant fights mobile ticketing, who will benefit?

Kong Qi, vice president of Alibaba Pictures and general manager of Taobao Films, said: "Currently, Alibaba Pictures is still a major shareholder of Taobao Films. In the future, Taobao Films will become a relatively independent holding subsidiary of Alibaba Pictures to operate."

Original title: The giant fights against mobile ticketing. Can the Taobao movie with 1.7 billion yuan in Series A win?

On the evening of May 15, Alibaba Pictures Group issued an announcement stating that the company's Internet ticketing business platform (hereinafter referred to as "Taobao Movies") received a Series A financing of 1.7 billion yuan. The overall valuation of Taobao Movies after this round of financing reached 13.7 billion yuan.

The announcement shows that the Series A financing of Taobao Films was led by CDH Investment, Ant Financial, and Sina.com, and many institutions such as Hehe Films, Bona Films, Huace Films, Nanpai Pan Entertainment, and Lianrui Films participated.

Since its launch at the end of 2014, Taobao Movies has rapidly emerged in a year and has begun to compete for market share with big-name mobile ticketing players such as Cat's Eye, Guevara and Nuomi. Data shows that Taobao Movies provides online seat selection and ticket purchase services for more than 5000 theaters across the country, covering theater box office accounting for 95% of the country's total box office.

At the end of 2015, Alibaba Pictures acquired the Taobao movie business from Ababa Group. After a series of business integrations, Taobao movies have become an important part of Alibaba Pictures 'Internet promotion and distribution business segment, and it is also the entire industry that Alibaba Pictures is building. A key part of the chain entertainment platform.

After integrating into the Alibaba Pictures ecosystem, Taobao Films 'business form has been greatly enriched. Now it has online and offline two-way publicity and distribution capabilities, and has become a pan-entertainment marketing platform with Internet genes.

According to Entertainment Capital, Kong Qi, vice president of Alibaba Pictures and general manager of Taobao Films, said: "Currently, Alibaba Pictures is still a major shareholder of Taobao Films. In the future, Taobao Films will become a relatively independent holding subsidiary of Alibaba Pictures to operate."

In the same industry, in addition to Taobao movies, Tencent's micro-tickets are also growing rapidly. On November 17 last year, Tencent's micro-ticket group raised a total of 1.5 billion yuan in Series C financing, with a valuation of nearly 10 billion yuan. Investment institutions include Tencent, Wanda, Cultural Capital China, Luxin and Gangtai Culture, etc. At that time, it was known as the fastest-growing "unicorn" company in history. Now after merging with Guevara, it has become the largest player on the market.

At present, WeChat ticket has three major ticket purchase entrances, including WeChat wallet "movie tickets", QQ wallet "movie performance tickets" and WeChat ticket App.

Data provided by the WeChat Movie Ticket Official shows that thanks to WeChat's 460 million monthly active users and more than 80 million Weixin Pay users, and without having to download a new APP, it can be purchased within 10 seconds and other inherent advantages such as being able to complete ticket purchase, micro-tickets quickly covered 3000 cinemas across the country in one year. In the eight months since it launched online seat selection, its performance growth rate has doubled 20 times. The total box office created accounts for 5% of the market share, and currently has an average daily ticket volume of 60,000 to 70,000 tickets. The peak is as high as 150,000.

Another one that is quite powerful in mobile ticketing is Cat's Eye Movies. On April 11 this year, Cat's Eye announced that it would split from Meituan and would independently raise funds and make early investment in film shooting. Cat's Eye has also performed well in mobile ticketing in recent years. As of December 2015, Cat's Eye Films has covered more than 100 million ticket purchasing users, and the number of daily active users has exceeded 10 million. Its business covers more than 700 cities across the country and has more than 5000 links across the country. Cinema works closely together.

In 2012, Meituan. com's movie ticket transaction volume was 650 million yuan, accounting for 3.8% of the mainland box office. In 2013, the total transaction volume of Cat's Eye films was 1.5 billion yuan, accounting for 6.9% of the mainland box office. In 2014, Cat's Eye movie transactions totaled 5 billion yuan, accounting for 16.9% of the mainland box office and 60% of the online box office. In the first half of 2015, the transaction volume of Cat's Eye films exceeded 6 billion yuan, and the annual transaction volume reached 15.6 billion yuan.

From this point of view, the mobile ticketing field seems to have emerged a three-pronged situation. However, although the three ticketing platforms currently do not have much gap in ticket sales, it still remains to be seen how follow-up film content, production, distribution and big data will develop.

Editor: vian