As the fight between BookMyShow and Paytm becomes intense, the online ticketing platform sees its losses widening.

Bigtree Entertainment that owns and runs online ticketing platform BookMyShow, saw a net loss of Rs 140.25 crore for the financial year 2018, a wider margin compared to the net loss of Rs 128 crore incurred in fiscal 2017, revealed documents filed with Registrar of Companies (RoC).

However, its revenue increased by 29 percent to Rs 386.07 crore in FY18 from Rs 299.57 crore in FY17. A significant part of the company's expenses was related to employee benefits that increased by Rs 44 crore to Rs 119.36 crore in fiscal 2018.

Ashish Hemrajani, Co-founder, BookMyShow

Launched in 2007, BookMyShow recently raised $100 (about Rs 685 crore) million in its Series D round of funding from TPG Growth, the investment platform of alternative asset firm TPG, and existing investors Stripes Group, SAIF Partners, Accel Partners and Network 18 in July this year. This latest investment round valued the company at about $850 million.

As per the company's website, BookMyShow's platform facilitates over 15 million ticket bookings a month and has more than 30 million customers.

Alibaba-backed Paytm is the company's main competitor. The Chinese conglomerate had also acquired a similar platform, Chennai-based TicketNew in 2017.

Recently, BookMyShow also ventured into ticketing for international events. In 2017, it acquired food-tech platform Burrp for a paltry sum of Rs 6.7 lakh.

Multiplex chain operator PVR renewed its non-exclusive agreements with both online platforms BookMyShow and Paytm for the sale of its movie tickets all over the country for three years. In a stock exchange filing, it revealed, “PVR will receive an upfront advance payment of Rs 350 crore” from the two aggregators.