Sandhya Devanathan, the newly appointed leader of Meta’s India operations, has outlined four key focus areas including enabling small businesses to leverage the digital opportunity, connecting content creators on Reels to large brands, growing the WhatsApp business messaging platform to enable e-commerce, and innovating products and features in India for the global market.
“ I am lucky to be here at a time when India’s digital story is growing fast. With 900 million Internet users, India is set to become the third largest nation by GDP globally, and by 2030 reports suggest that the digital economy will be hitting a trillion dollars. We want to ensure that we have a seat at that table of that transformation that’s happening and be a catalyst for India’s economic growth,” Devanathan told businessline in her first media interview.
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Devanathan takes charge of Meta India at a time when the social media companies are facing regulatory headwinds including issues around fact checking, privacy and data protection. There is also the macro economic headwinds that could impact the digital advertising spends by companies.
Unperturbed
But Devanathan remains unfazed. “It has been reported that India is the eighth largest market but what’s more interesting to me is that ad spends as a percentage of GDP is low at 0.6 per cent compared to 1.9 per cent in the US. So I think there is one that is a lot of room to grow. The second thing is digital is almost half of all of the ad spends today and growing at 20 per cent. We are very focussed on making sure that the dollars that are spent are driving the business outcomes,” Devanathan said adding that India’s GDP growth has been much better than other countries and there are green shoots across different sectors.
One of the things that’s changed with Devanathan’s appointment is that the India region will report to the Asia Pacific region. Earlier, the India business was reporting directly to Meta’s headquarters at Menlo Park. But Devanthan assures that this will have no impact on the importance of India in Meta’s global operations. “India is like front and centre for Meta and continues to be an important country,“ she said.