Meta India Appoints Sandhya Devanathan As New India Head

Meta India (formerly Facebook) has appointed Sandhya Devanathan as its new director for the Indian market.

Following Ajit Mohan’s resignation as Meta’s previous India chief, the social media behemoth said on Thursday that Sandhya Devanathan had been designated the country’s leader.

Meta owns all of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Marne Levine, the company’s chief business officer, expressed his satisfaction at Devanathan’s appointment as the new leader of Meta’s activities in India.

Sandhya Devanathan takes over management of Meta during a trying time for the company, which recently let go of more than 11,000 employees, or 13% of its staff. 

According to Reuters, the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, made an expensive bet on the metaverse project, increasing the company’s overall spending by a fifth in the third quarter.

As a result, investors sold Meta’s shares, driving it down 20% and wiping off the company’s market worth of approximately $67 billion. Meta also reported its fourth straight quarter of sliding quarterly earnings. 

According to Reuters, the company’s bad outlook is due to a number of factors, including TikTok’s tough competition, a slowdown in global economic growth, changes to Apple’s privacy laws that have an influence on its advertising business, and diminishing global economic growth.

In 2016, Sandhya Devanathan joined Meta. She helped set up the businesses and teams in Vietnam and Singapore. She additionally helped Meta with its Southeast Asian e-commerce endeavors.

Devanathan has worked in banking, payments, and technology for 22 years. Devanathan, according to Meta, “moved to lead gaming for APAC (Asia-Pacific region) in 2020, which is one of Meta’s largest verticals globally.

Sandhya also brings a passion for developing women leaders in business and is the Executive Sponsor for Women@APAC at Meta as well as the global lead for Play Forward, a global Meta initiative to improve diversity representation in the gaming industry.