Meta Expands India Head Sandhya Devanathan’s Role To Include Southeast Asia

SUMMARY

Meta India’s business head Sandhya Devanathan is also taking additional responsibilities to lead the social media giant’s Southeast Asia business

Devanathan has been associated with Meta for nearly a decade

Devanathan has over two decades of experience and is an alumna of Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi

Meta’s vice president for India, Sandhya Devanathan, will be taking on additional responsibilities to lead the company’s Southeast Asia operations.

This comes as Meta’s Asia-Pacific chief Dan Neary prepares to leave in the coming months after a 12-year stint. Benjamin Joe will be succeeding Neary.

In a LinkedIn post, Devanathan said, “…I am excited also to announce that I will take on additional responsibilities to lead our business in both India and Southeast Asia.”

Devanathan has been associated with Meta for nearly a decade after joining Facebook in 2016 as group director Southeast Asia for its ecommerce and travel business. She was later elevated to Facebook Singapore’s managing director and Vietnam’s business head.

In 2020, she took on the role of vice president for Meta’s gaming vertical for the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. She rose through the ranks over the years to become Meta India’s vice president in 2023.

Devanathan started off her professional journey with Citi bank and served it for almost a decade in multiple roles.

She was also associated with Standard Chartered Bank for over six years leaving it in 2015 as managing director for retail banking and payment products.

Currently, she is also board observer of Jio Platform Limited since July 2023.

Devanathan also added in her post that she will be focussing on investing in products to drive Meta’s business growth.

The announcement comes at a time when Meta and AI giant OpenAI are looking to strike partnership with Indian conglomerate Reliance on new AI businesses.

As per The Information’s report, Meta Platforms has its own “ambitions” to work with Reliance on new AI businesses.

Reliance, which is developing one of the biggest data centers in Gujarat’s Jamnagar, has discussed the possibility of selling the data center capacity to OpenAI and Meta. The company is also said to have deliberated on running OpenAI and Meta large language models (LLM) at a potential 3 gigawatt (GW) data centre in the city.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Meta is looking to strengthen its presence in India by setting up its new office in Bengaluru and is actively hiring for engineering and product roles for artificial intelligence in the city.

Meta’s announcement follows after major tech giants, such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, have already started building engineering and product teams in Bengaluru and across the country.