Meta India head Sandhya Devanathan on WhatsApp monetisation strategy, key focus areas, more

Sandhya Devanathan, VP and MD, Meta India

Sandhya Devanathan took over Meta India when the world was waking up to the endless possibilities of generative AI and the metaverse was fast becoming passé. Meta, however, continued to bet big on the metaverse while rolling back several of its emerging tech experiments and streamlining its workforce after laying off over 20,000 employees.

It’s been nine months since Devanathan took charge amid the global advertising slowdown and tough macroeconomic environment. India is one of Meta’s largest markets in terms of users. The social media giant even decided to host its first global offline business messaging event, Conversations, in Mumbai on September 20.

In an interview with Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the event, Devanathan, vice president and managing director at Meta India, discussed her game plan for the next phase of growth in India, Meta’s Gen AI and metaverse strategy, WhatsApp channels, and more.

Edited excerpts:

It’s been nine months since you took over. What are your key takeaways from how the company has operated in India?

I was away for 17 years and then coming back to the country, I saw this huge pace of digital transformation that's happening – people were talking about 5G, DPI (digital public infrastructure). As someone who's come back and experienced the power of that by opening a bank account pretty seamlessly, getting Aadhaar, and using DigiLocker and Digi Yatra for everything, it’s been impressive.

What's also impressive is where WhatsApp is placed in this… we're active participants in this huge transformation that's happening in the country. WhatsApp is accepted as a verb in the country and I was really blown away by all of that.

What’s going to be your next key focus area for Meta in India?

I spent my first few months just onboarding, meeting ecosystem partners, creators, users of our platforms, meeting my team and spending a lot of time with them, and businesses that advertise with us, small and big. Then came up with a bunch of priorities. We want to serve businesses of all sizes and create economic value for them because doing so also helps us be a catalyst for India's digital transformation.

If you think about India's GDP contribution from small businesses, it's only expected to rise and you can't have them being left behind by all the transformation and digital revolution that's happening in the country. So we feel our platforms can play a great role in enabling these businesses. That's a big area of focus.

The second is business messaging. So Axis Bank’s CEO was saying around 15 million people have registered on Axis Bank on WhatsApp. They are getting 1 million new customers every month coming on WhatsApp. They've disbursed around Rs 1,000 crore of loans on WhatsApp. Those numbers are pretty mindboggling if you think about the big companies and how they are transforming using WhatsApp, it is our top priority. You have seen in our announcements that many of them are from an ‘India-first lens’.

Thirdly, there’s a huge momentum for creators and short-form videos. The number of people consuming video content in India is soon going to reach 650 million. We want to give them a voice and the tools that they need to stay safe and to monetise their content.

India has been big in terms of user base. How do you plan to strategise converting this into revenue?

Our user base has been very active, large, and consequential across WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. When we think about revenue within the country itself, I'll point to a few things. One is advertising as a percentage of GDP in India is low, at around 0.5 percent of GDP. When you compare it to the US, it's like 1.9 percent at this point. So there is a lot of headroom for the overall ad industry to grow and mature and become larger, so there is a tonne of opportunity for companies in this space.

The second thing I would say is we're quite happy with the returns that we're providing to businesses, the outcomes that businesses are seeing on our platform. And we think that the money that they're investing in us is well spent. We won't like to take a rupee if it's not delivering value for our businesses. And we're quite happy with the trends that we're seeing this year.

How is Meta, which is still bullish on the metaverse, viewing the Gen AI opportunity? Will both these technologies converge into your apps?

We are absolutely focused on both the metaverse and AI and we don't see them as divorced from each other. We have been doing AI investments for over a decade now. So Gen AI is new, but our investments in AI have powered recommendations on our platform, and have powered things that we do to keep users safe on our platform. We take down a lot of content based on the AI technologies that we've built.

More recently, we built a suite of business products using AI, which is our Advantage+ products that deliver better results for businesses. And we've seen a 25 percent increase in returns for businesses since we've launched Advantage+.

We have built Llama, which is our open source model, and we also have released it for commercial use... We're now thinking of using Gen AI on our platforms to help businesses. For a lot of small businesses, creative tools are hard for them to use and our creative ads take time. We're doing something called a Creative Sandbox, where we are testing with businesses and this is early stages where they can on the fly develop creatives. So all of that is an AI effort.

In the metaverse, you're building worlds. You can use Gen AI to build those worlds more seamlessly and faster. So we do think Metaverse is going to get a fillip because of all the advancements that are happening in Gen AI. So our investments in both continue.

WhatsApp Business is set to hit the $1 billion mark in India by the year end. What is driving this growth? What role will India play in WhatsApp's monetisation strategy?

What's driving this growth are the users and the businesses on our platform. In fact, the last number we released was that we see a billion messages to a business on WhatsApp every week. This is a global number. People expect messages to be instant, real time. They don't want to pick up the phone and be on hold. They want you to meet them where they are, which is on a messaging platform.

A lot of what we're seeing is users and consumers demanding a different way to interact with the business. And what we've seen in India is playing out more than the other markets globally. So nine in 10 people that we surveyed have communicated with the business at least once in a week in India.

But people earlier this year were calling out WhatsApp for Business for being intrusive and spam-like. How is Meta approaching this issue?

We want every interaction to be valuable – both users and businesses should find it a good use of their time. To get these messages, users should have opted in to be contacted by that business.

If businesses violate that, there is an option to block a business and people do use that if they find businesses that are spamming. We have built a lot of features around reporting a business, around blocking a business. We have also invested in education. So, for example, for this festival season, we are already working with some of our largest business partners, educating them on how to approach customers.

What’s the game plan for WhatsApp for Business in India in the next 2-3 years? Mark Zuckerberg has already called it the next major monetisation opportunity.

WhatsApp is going to drive monetisation for Meta globally, and especially in India, it is going to be the next growth engine. Not just WhatsApp, the overall business messaging on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. So we do think that it's going to be a big growth engine for us. India is also one of the priority markets for Meta, so you will see us invest a lot more.

You recently launched WhatsApp Channels. What’s the thought process behind starting it? How many sign ups have you seen so far and what’s the India opportunity here?

Early days yet on WhatsApp Channels. So the idea is… say, an actor who's doing behind the scenes of the movie or a government wanting to provide reliable information. So it's a one-way broadcast. It's a safe and secure way of reaching people who may be interested in hearing from you. So it's been developed and designed keeping that in mind. And it's another way of communicating right, so that's how we've designed WhatsApp Channels.

We are very excited about the response that we've seen in India. A lot of people have signed up, but it's very early days, so we'll have to see how it grows and what we add as features. But so far, so good.

Meta has been investing in startups like Meesho and Unacademy. Are there going to be more such investments?

Nothing I could share at this point. But yeah, we continue to invest in the startup story in India. So we have VC programmes where we educate startups. We have the XR fund where we've invested $3 million because we believe Indian developers are going to be the largest in the world next year. So we want them to create content for the metaverse, we want to give them the tools to do that.

With all the work that we're doing with small businesses and with the trade association CAIT, while smaller, we hope some of them will become startups and unicorns in the future. So our commitment and our investment in India continues. It's not company-specific.