Sandhya Devanathan has spent almost two years in India as head of American social media giant Meta. The period has seen the company expand its business while growing consumer engagement across all its platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. But amidst this fast-paced growth, the company has also faced severe regulatory challenges.
The latest being CCI’s penalty on charges that the company illegally shared certain user data of WhatsApp with Insta and Facebook for targeted advertising.The matter is sub-judice as Meta has decided to challenge it. We speak to Devanathan on how she perceives India as a market and how Meta takes products developed here global.
How has social media growth been in India?
India continues to remain a super important market for Meta globally. It’s one of the largest user markets for us and the trends that we’re seeing here are definitely about continued growth and engagement across all our platforms. It’s not just Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, but even for the recently-launched Threads, India is one of the largest markets globally with over 200 million downloads. We’re seeing continued momentum and growth, across the board. Also, we are witnessing an equally strong adoption of newer products such as AI platform Llama.
India provides the largest user base for Meta’s platforms. Do you also make products which are then taken up globally?
I think we are almost sort of using India as the playbook, you know, for global.
Consider this: India was one of the first countries to test and launch (Instagram) Reels in 2020. Today, it’s one of the strongest products that we have globally. India is also the first country where we launched Payments on WhatsApp Business. Also, India is the biggest market for Meta AI in terms of usage. It is among the top three markets globally for the adoption of our open-source large language AI model Llama.
In fact, when we launched WhatsApp Flows last year, we launched it first in India. Mark (Zuckerberg) announced it. Then we took it global. So, this is very much one of the things that India has been doing. I and the team remain proud of this – how we make India the centre of where we innovate, where we build products and then take them global, all because we have that scale here.
I see that happening even now, when it comes to some of the other tests that we’re running. For example, we are piloting in India a test around small business calling on WhatsApp. Basically, it’s about when you’re chatting with a small business on WhatsApp and suddenly the chat is not enough and you want to talk to a person. It’s not automatically calling a business but remains within the context of the chat. You can then call the business. It has also been built with an India first lens.
And these can also be replicated globally?
Yeah. Now we’ll announce it globally. But the lead came from, very much India.
So, what are the other Made-in-India solutions that can go global?
Today, Llama has been growing globally where it has over 400 million downloads. Many of them are from India, and so India is a very large market. Developers here are downloading Llama and then building solutions, tools and whatever on top of that. So, I think there too, India’s playing a very significant role, just given the size and the adoption that we’re seeing. India is a big contributor to that as well.
On AI as well, India will play a pretty critical role in terms of adoption, usage and development of Llama.
Coming to regulations, it appears that global companies like Meta are averse to regulations?
We welcome regulation, especially if it’s progressive. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act was a perfect example of that for us.
