Naspers to invest USD 250m in ibibo for extended leadership

Indian online travel venture Ibibo Group today announced that Naspers will invest USD 250m in the group, which will focus extending ibibo's leadership position in the Indian hotels category and on additional technology innovations.

Ibibo processed more than 6.5m transactions for the period October to December (Q3) 2015. It is the largest online travel company in India, generating more than 2.5x the transaction volumes of its nearest competitor.

The group owns integrated online travel properties such as Goibibo.com (India's No 1 hotels booking engine and also a leading air ticketing aggregator), and redBus.in (No 1 online bus ticketing platform).

In a recent research report by Morgan Stanley, Goibibo was rated number one by hoteliers across a number of parameters, including booking volumes, confirmed bookings, last minute bookings, backend and IT support, as well as Insights and market intelligence. Goibibo hotel bookings surpassed 1.6m room nights during Q3, up 400 percent YOY, making it the largest hotels booking platform in India. Mobile contributed to 71 percent of the bookings in the month of December 2015, up from 42 percent a year ago.

Ibibo Group Founder and CEO, Ashish Kashyap said, "Our objective is to solve problems for the transportation and accommodation providers and to connect them to the travelers. The commitment from both Naspers and Tencent to ibibo is testimony to the strength of our platforms and the opportunities ahead."

Naspers Group CEO, Bob van Dijk said, "The Indian ecommerce market, and the online travel segment in particular, offers exciting growth prospects for us as a group. With a talented, proven management team and exceptional technology, ibibo is well positioned to benefit from an increasing number of people using online travel services going forward.