Perhaps in response to the dark environment of the cinema, Alibaba Film Group once again chose to make an announcement at night.

Zoomlion Shengshi, an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Alibaba Pictures, signed an equity transfer agreement with six minority shareholders. Alibaba Pictures will acquire the Taopiao equity held by these shareholders, totaling about 9.12%, with a total price of about 1.333 billion yuan.

After this acquisition, Alibaba Pictures will hold about 96.71% of the shares of Taopiao, which will be valued at 14.6 billion yuan.

As for the shareholding increase, the Board of Directors of Alibaba Pictures believes that "the overall shareholding increase of Hangzhou Chenxi is committed to making Taopiao a core platform for the new infrastructure of the Group's film industry, which can meet the needs of the Group's medium and long-term strategic deployment and business planning, and is conducive to promoting the rapid development of the Group's business and creating higher value for the Company's shareholders.

The adult version is: "Taopiao is the core of Alibaba Pictures at present, and the increase of shareholding can increase the income in the future", but the author always thinks that this can also be understood as reducing future losses and troubles.

Of course, although it has always been about value and interests, for the moment, there has been no interest in what Taopiao has brought to Alibaba Film.

Burn money

Not surprisingly, this word is still one of the main contributions of Taopiao to Ali.

According to the performance announcement of Alibaba Pictures in February this year, the loss in 2016 was between 950 million and 1 billion yuan, and the reason for the loss was Taopiao, "the market promotion expenditure invested to gain more market share".

Of course, investment always pays off, such as winning the first place in the market.

A recent report from the data company Quest Mobile shows that the number of daily active users of the app in the movie online ticketing industry ranks first - unfortunately, Cat's Eye Movie still ranks first among the monthly active users.

But this is a strange circle. Users who vote with their feet are very simple. Those who have subsidies and high posts will use them, while continuous subsidies will continue to lose money. Of course, Alibaba Pictures understands this situation and will not burn it all the time, so Alibaba has launched a series of attempts such as a cinema card.

This way is good at first, at least for users, if it hasn't changed recently. According to some users, there are some problems that the cinema card is not as cheap as ordinary users, and even users of the special price cinema card can't enjoy it. For this reason, someone even opened a special question in Zhihu, "Why is it more expensive for users with cinema cards to buy movie tickets at the same time period than ordinary users?"

I don't know whether this is an algorithm problem or a routine problem. Personally, I hope this is an algorithm problem. After all, Alibaba Pictures' ambition is not a small sum of money, which was mentioned again in the shareholding increase announcement.

On the announcement of shareholding increase, Alibaba Pictures clearly wrote: "In response to the trend of the film industry and the rapid iterative evolution of consumer behavior, the Group will continue to focus on the entertainment industry ecology for layout and business upgrading, and build a new infrastructure for the film industry. As the most important platform for users to reach the function of the new infrastructure, Taopiao has established a solid business foundation in the field of film promotion, distribution and ticketing, and has developed into one of the leading online ticketing platforms in China."

This paragraph is really wordy. To put it simply, we think that online ticket buying will be the future norm, while Taopiao is Alibaba Pictures' future layout. At present, it has made some achievements in film promotion, distributioand ticketing.

Therefore, Taopiao is a "core platform" for Alibaba Pictures.

This may also be good news. Until the merger of Maoyan and Taopiao, users should always find a discount.