MTS is stocking up on tickets – Newspaper Kommersant No. 38 (7483) dated 03/06/2023

MTS structures, which are already developing ticketing services and engaged in promotional activities, are negotiating the purchase of the TicketsCloud ticketing platform from its founder, Egor Yegerev. Another specialized service will help MTS, which already owns Ticketland and Ponominalu, enter new niches, for example, the secondary ticket sales market. Experts note that since the beginning of 2023, ticket sales for events have been actively growing again, which may push other large companies into transactions.

Kommersant’s sources said that MTS Entertainment wants to buy TicketsCloud ticket operator. According to them, negotiations are “already in the final stage”, the platform has passed a “pre-sale audit”. The new asset will allow MTS “to gain a foothold in the segment and expand the ability to collect and process big data about users for the subsequent use of recommender algorithms,” a source familiar with the details of the negotiations believes. MTS declined to comment. Egor Egerev, founder and CEO of TicketsCloud, did not answer Kommersant.

One of Kommersant’s sources clarifies that the entire company was valued in the range from 500 million to 1 billion rubles. According to another interlocutor, we are talking about 2 billion rubles. Sergey Babich, producer of the Colisium International Music Forum, estimates TicketsCloud at 2.2–2.4 billion rubles. According to the editor-in-chief of Intermedia Yevgeny Safronov, we can talk about “tens of millions of dollars, but deferred payments and options are likely, as is customary in the cultural industries.”

In 2018, MTS for 3.6 billion rubles. has already bought two Russian ticket operators at once – Ticketland and Ponominalu. In 2020, the operator created a separate structure for managing the ticket business – MTS Entertainment, which was headed by Ponominalu co-founder Mikhail Minin. Now she manages the Ticketland and Ponominalu services, the MTS Live portal and application, and develops a network of concert venues in large cities.

TicketsCloud provides ticketing solutions for event organizers. “This is the first specialized service for which other operators and partners act as ticket distributors. Any platform or organizer, by placing tickets for sale, can immediately conclude a deal in their personal account with most other ticket operators – now TicketsCloud has 194 counterparties – ticket distributors, ”Sergey Babich explained. He added that the company is developing the Vibe mobile application, which implements smart tickets with broad functionality (a digital ticket that works similarly to smart contracts and may have additional functionality). “This creates an opportunity within the system to safely resell tickets, communicate and get acquainted in the chat of the event, creating its own community around the artist or festival,” Mr. Babich specified. “In fact, we are talking about a tool for controlling and monitoring the ticket market.”

The trend towards consolidation of the main players in the ticket market through mergers and acquisitions has been observed for more than a year. Consolidation intensified against the backdrop of the cancellation of concerts by foreign and part of Russian performers due to hostilities in Ukraine. In 2022, Post-Bank bought the SmartBilet ticket operator, and Kassir.ru bought one of the oldest Parter.ru aggregators from the German CTS Eventim (see Kommersant dated August 26, 2022). “The ticket business itself is extremely low-margin and can only operate at high turnover or within ecosystems,” Sergey Babich believes. The purchase of TicketsCloud could be a return to the pre-crisis trend of strengthening ecosystems, he believes: since the beginning of 2023, the ticket market for events has been actively growing and has already exceeded the pre-pandemic 2019 levels, which may activate M&A in the segment.

Yulia Tishina, Valeria Lebedeva