For Meta, India Is Most Significant Country For All New Products

For social media giant Meta, India has emerged as the most significant country for the new things that the company does across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The country is a very critical market for Facebook from different aspects, Manish Chopra, director and head of partnerships for Facebook India (Meta), said.

“A lot of new product learning and incubation is done here (Indian market) and ‘Reels’ is an example of that… this is the market where we have done the most amount of testing of new product features,” Chopra said as reported by news agency PTI.

With its short-form videos, Meta has provided opportunities to numerous brands and millions of creators to express their creativity and build audiences in India, Chopra added.

“Reels is helping creators express their creativity, passion, and build audiences and followers that relate with them through the content,” he said.

Reels, which was launched in 2020 in India, has gained popularity Tier 2 and 3 cities. “India is the lighthouse country for ‘Reels’ for Meta globally,” Chopra said.

Citing a research report, Chopra said that around 200 Mn people are spending about 45 mins per day on short-form videos. The number of short-video users is expected to go up to 600 Mn people.

As Reels have gained immense popularity, many brands are using Reels to engage with users. “In India, more than 50% of the followers for the businesses that are on Instagram are coming from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities; so a company can reach out to these markets by being on Instagram and Facebook,” Chopra noted.

In FY22, Facebook India Online Services reported gross advertisement revenues of INR 16,189 Cr , up 74% year-on-year (YoY) from INR 9,326 Cr in FY21. The company’s net profit also grew 132% YoY to INR 297 Cr during the fiscal year ended March 2022

In India, tech giants including Meta have been under government’s scrutiny for multiple reasons. While the government brought new rules to govern social media platforms, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) is also updating its ‘antitrust and merger’ toolkit to address challenges related to digital markets which might impact tech giants. 

In another instance today, Meta’s WhatsApp has faced global outage, owing to which the platform’s users were unable to send messages and make calls. However, the platform resolved and restarted its services within an hour of the outage reported.