Sandhya Devanathan is named as Meta’s new head of India.
Sandhya Devanathan has been appointed as the Vice President of Meta India by Facebook parent company Meta, it was revealed today. While continuing to support the long-term expansion of Meta’s business and commitment to India, Sandhya Devanathan will concentrate on bringing the organization’s revenue and business priorities together to serve its partners and clients.
Ajit Mohan joined the competing Snap Inc. a few days after Sandhya Devanathan was named director of India for Meta Platforms.
The government of India is currently strengthening legislation controlling Big Tech corporations, which coincides with Devanathan’s hiring at a time when Facebook is encountering regulatory issues there.
For years, the business has come under fire for not doing more to stop the spread of false information and hate speech in India. Devanathan joined Meta in 2016, and she will start in her new position in January.
Who is Sandhya Devanathan?
Sandhya Devanathan is a seasoned businesswoman leader with 22 years of experience in a profession that has taken her all over the world. She has collaborated with some of the most recognizable names in technology, payments, and finance.
Devanathan earned a BTech in chemical engineering from Andhra University before beginning her work at the turn of the millennium. She then studied for an MBA at the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), University of Delhi. In 2014, she also enrolled in a leadership degree at Oxford University’s Sad Business School.
She spent the first nine years of her career working for Citibank, followed by six years at Standard Chartered Bank. She signed up for Facebook in 2016. She has served as the Business Head for Vietnam and the Country Managing Director for Singapore. She most recently served as Meta’s Vice President of APAC Gaming, one of the business’s major global verticals.
She has served on the Asia Advisory Board of the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society, the Steering Committee of the Digital Readiness Council Singapore, the Board of Directors of Pepper Financial Services Group, and the Board of Advisors at the College of Integrative Studies at Singapore Management University.
Devanathan will return to India in her new position and take the helm of the company that controls popular apps like Instagram and WhatsApp in addition to Facebook.
With significant departures in its main market, Meta names a new head of India.
Devanathan was promoted to head and vice president of Meta India on Thursday by the social giant. Devanathan joined the company in 2016 and helped with the expansion of its businesses in Vietnam and Singapore. To oversee the company’s gaming operations in the Asia-Pacific area, Devanathan moved in 2020.
The American corporation claims that India is its greatest market in terms of users, with over a billion Indians utilizing Meta services. With hundreds of millions of users, the Facebook app family, which includes Instagram and WhatsApp, has experienced the strongest growth in India in recent years.
Additionally, it has made a number of bold investments in the nation, including writing a $5.7 billion cheque to Indian telecom company Jio Platforms and stepping up WhatsApp’s commerce functionality.
India is leading in the uptake of digital technology, and Meta introduced many of its popular products there initially, including Reels and Business Messaging. According to Marne Levine, Chief Business Officer of Meta, “We are pleased to have recently launched JioMart on WhatsApp, which is our first end-to-end purchasing experience in India.
I’m happy to introduce Sandhya as our new representative for India. Sandhya has a demonstrated track record of growing organizations, creating outstanding and diverse teams, fostering product innovation, and forging solid alliances. We are ecstatic to have her overseeing Meta’s continuous expansion in India.
The new hire comes at a time when Meta has lost numerous significant employees in India during the past several weeks. Late this month, Ajit Mohan, the former CEO of Meta India, left the company to become the president of rival Snap’s Asia-Pacific division.
Abhijit Bose, the director of WhatsApp India, and Rajiv Aggarwal, the director of public policy at Meta India, resigned earlier this week.
The WhatsApp service has been difficult to gain traction in India’s mobile payments sector, despite the parent company Meta’s recent expansion of its financial operations there.
The flamboyant entrepreneur and co-founder of financial firm BharatPe, Ashneer Grover, tweeted that “WhatsApp Pay has to be the biggest failure in India as a digital product.” “Everyone has WhatsApp installed on their phone, and utilizing UPI to transmit money on WhatsApp is as simple as sending images. It ought to have defeated Google Pay, Paytm, and PhonePe,” he continued.
WhatsApp has struggled to obtain regulatory approval from the National Payments Corporation of India, the payments body that regulates the widely used UPI instrument, in order to expand its mobile payments service to its entire user base of more than 500 million users in the nation. WhatsApp sued the Indian government over recent regulatory changes last year.
Earlier this year, NPCI gave WhatsApp permission to make WhatsApp Pay available to 100 million Indian customers. Meanwhile, some users have criticized WhatsApp for not taking strong enough measures to stop businesses from spamming them on the platform.
edited and proofread by nikita sharma
