Meta doubling down on WhatsApp Business in India: MD Sandhya Devanathan

Sandhya Devanathan, VP and MD, Meta India

Meta is doubling down on its focus on WhatsApp Business in India, where the social media giant is seeing around 60 percent of its users interacting with businesses on the messaging app every week, said its India MD Sandhya Devanathan. She was speaking at the Mumbai Tech Week on February 19.

This comes less than six months after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled slew of new product features focused on business messaging at Meta’s Conversation event in Mumbai. The social media giant sees India as a priority market to drive the growth of WhatsApp Business.

A few of these features include enabling users to purchase directly from businesses within the messaging app and allowing businesses to create customised experiences for customers through WhatsApp Flows.

Meta at present has over 500 million WhatsApp users in India.

Devanathan said, “Around 81% of our investments are aimed at improving our core access services on both platforms for people who are creators, and businesses. We want to focus on reels and AI. I spoke about 60% WhatsApp users interacting with businesses every week, which is a massive one.”

“Overall around 92% users are using messaging apps to interact with the businesses driving quite a lot of commerce and alternate commerce already happening on WhatsApp and this is where we're doubling down and building,” she added.

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

Meta is currently partnering with The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) to upskill 10 million traders in WhatsApp Business tools over the next three years. Devanthan said that the company is focussed on innovation and inclusion, and wants to train small traders across multiple languages in setting up their catalogues on WhatsApp, where they can also set up reminders, alerts, make payments etc.

Meta’s other key focus area Reels too has been a success in India, where Born on Instagram programme has certified 800,000 Indian content creators and is now helping them monetise their content. Of this 800,000 certified creators, 75% are from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

Devanathan shared that Indian users across urban, Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are spending 55 minutes daily consuming reels, projecting a huge market opportunity.

Five factors to drive digital economy

India has a potential to become a $8-trillion economy by 2030 and around $1 trillion of that will be driven by digital.

Meta believes there are five major factors that will create this digital opportunity. According to Devanathan, the first factor is just increasing digital adoption, followed by artificial intelligence, conversational commerce as seen through platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram. The fourth factor is around personalisation and the fifth factor is the India story of extensive consumption and user generated content.