Zomato, an Indian food delivery website, announced on Wednesday that it will spend $244.2 million to acquire the movie and Paytm's event ticketing divisions in an effort to strengthen its rapidly expanding ticketing division.

The acquisition strengthens Zomato's position in the Reliance-backed BookMyShow-dominated Indian online movie and live event ticketing sector.

Paytm, the most direct rival of BookMyShow since 2017, is selling both its "TicketNew" movie ticketing platform and its "Insider" live event ticketing platform to Zomato in order to give up its market dominance. Zomato stated in a statement to shareholders that it expects the acquisition to increase gross order value at its non-core businesses by more than three times over the next two years.

Although Zomato's ticketing business made up only 2% of the firm's overall revenue in the previous year, the non-core businesses of restaurant table booking services and an events organizing and ticketing unit were also its fastest-growing divisions. Zomato started running its ticketing company over a year ago.

The agreement stated that Paytm's platforms will provide ticketing services for a full year, after which they will fully switch to Zomato's recently, released 'District' mobile application. Furthermore, some 280 workers from Paytm's entertainment ticketing division will join Zomato. In 2017 and 2018, Paytm invested 2.68 billion rupees to buy Insider and TicketNew. Paytm had developed its movie ticketing business internally.

Following a directive from India's central bank to close down its banking division in January, the company is now abandoning these ventures in order to concentrate on its core payments and financial services operations.