Cleartrip acquires Flyin

Online Travel agency Cleartrip Pvt. Ltd has acquired Saudi Arabian Travel start-up Flyin for an undisclosed amount.

This is Cleartrip first cross-border acquisition and the Mumbai-based company is looking to step up operations in West Asia’s travel market, which has witnessed the entry of a dozen domestic and international budget operators such as FlyDubai, AirArabia, Pegasus Airlines and others. The company claimed that the combined entity of Cleartrip and Flyin will have a market share of over 60% in West Asia.

Saudi-based Flyin, which was founded in 2008, currently offers bus and flight ticketing and several holiday packages on its online portal. It claims to aggregate more than 320,000 hotels and 450 airlines on its platform. Cleartrip, on the other hand, was founded in 2006, and has been in West Asia for the past five years. It offers air, hotel and stays accommodation, and also aggregates local experiences on its portal.

Cleartrip claims to sell over 10 million flight tickets and 1.5 million hotel room nights annually. Cleartrip last raised an undisclosed round of funding from its existing investors Concur Technologies and Gund Investment, among others in June 2016. In India, online travel is largely led by players such as Cleartrip, Yatra and MakeMyTrip, which merged with Goibibo in 2016.

New Call Telecom acquired chat app Nimbuzz

New call Telecom is a young, dynamic telecommunication provider in UK. It was started in 2010. Recently, New Call Telecom acquired 70% stake in Mobile Instant Messaging and VoIP Company Nimbuzz for about $175 Million. Nimbuzz will now act as a unit of New Call Telecom. Nimbuzz had previously raised funding from Naspers and Mangrove Capital.

Founded in Netherlands by Evert Jaap Lugt in 2006, Nimbuzz shifted its corporate headquarters to Gurgaon in India a couple of years ago. It claims to have 201 Million subscribers in over 200 countries. In a month, the platform processes more than a billion voice-over-internet call minutes and in excess of 100 Billion besides operating one of the largest mobile advertising platforms in South Asia, Middle East, and North Africa regions.

The messenger claims it is the only multi-lingual solution provider, offering its service in more than 25 regional languages. It provides a single tool for making voice and peer-to-peer video calls, sending instant messages and sharing data via all major communications platforms. The company had earlier collaborated with Internet service provider Spectranet Hello IP to launch International-calling platforms for Indian users to make calls abroad for 1 paisa per second through this platform.

Last year Nimbuzz had entered a partnership with Cleartrip to enable travel bookings on its platform. Called the Cleartrip buddy, users can explore travel options as well as make bookings through it. On the app, users can do the preliminary search by adding basic information for their travel plans and for the actual transaction, they are led to a co-branded WAP page. New call will integrate the capabilities of the Nimbuzz platform along with a plethora of new apps with its Wi-Fi and home broadband service in India, and eventually in other parts of the world. Nimbuzz will also become an incubator for apps for New Call.

New Call is planning for more acquisitions in the Indian market in the fields of fixed line broadband, Wi-Fi, and e-commerce. This year, Facebook bought Whatsapp in Multi-billion dollar cash and stock deal while Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten bought messaging service Viber. Whatsapp dominates the Indian Messaging and chat app market and some of the other prominent players are Line, Tencent’s WeChat, and Bharti Softbank’s Hike.