Naspers, Tencent-backed travel group gets $250m more to slay India’s hotel industry

Photo credit: ZeroKing45.

Indian online travel venture ibibo Group has a quarter of a billion reasons to celebrate. Last night, it announced that South African global internet and media company Naspers Group will be pouring another US$250 million of investment into the group. Ibibo is a joint venture between Naspers and Chinese internet giant Tencent.

Naspers is ibibo’s principal shareholder. The latest investment brings its stake in the company to 90 percent, underscoring further the value of the travel industry in India. Ibibo’s not the only one bringing in numbers in the millions. Chinese travel booking site Ctrip poured US$180 million in convertible bonds into India’s MakeMyTrip in January, while Indian hotel marketplace OYO Rooms secured US$100 million last August from Softbank, among other investors.

As of July last year, over half of Indian ecommerce is travel-related, and ibibo claims that mobile contributed to 71 percent of its bookings in December 2015, a 42 percent increase from 2014.

“The Indian ecommerce market, and the online travel segment in particular, offers exciting growth prospects for us as a group,” said Naspers Group CEO Bob van Dijk in a statement.

Photo credit: Unique Hotels

Ibibo was launched by Ashish Kashyap in January 2007 as a social networking site. It changed to a travel ecommerce focus, and in 2009, it launched travel booking site Goibibo. In 2013, it acquired online bus and hotel ticketing site redBus.

“Our objective is to solve problems for the transportation and accommodation providers and to connect them to the travelers,” Ashish said in a statement.

In a report released in January by Morgan Stanley, Goibibo was ranked number one in hotel booking volumes in India. The report pegged the company as the fastest-growing hotel online travel agency in India.