Facebook’s Messenger app will now be helmed by Snapdeal’s ex-chief product officer Anand Chandrasekaran, a strategically planned appointment that unmistakably has India in its crosshairs. The texting service is one of the key offerings by the social media giant. It boasts of around one billion users, as of July 2016.
Chandrasekaran has formerly worked with tech biggies like Yahoo and has been chief product officer for Bharti Airtel too. He is the brainchild behind the music streaming service Wynk and the Airtel Money online payment service. The 38-year old executive is also the co-founder of Aeroprise, a company which develops mobile applications.
Facebook’s second highest number user base comes comes from India. It is aiming to boost its Messenger app too in this market. Wider usage of the internet in the country has seen various application companies like WeChat and Snapchat advertising their services in order to get more subscribers on board.
The social media giant intends to aggressively endorse its texting app in the Indian market. At a conference in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Messenger would be the next big sharing platform. The parent company has drafted plans for enabling the application to be used in multiple ways than just for sending messages.
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Keeping its relationship with India in mind, Facebook has continuously been trying to provide connectivity in remote areas with the hope of getting more subscribers (and therefore more ad revenue) for itself. It will be interesting to see how its decision to appoint Chandrasekaran to head Messenger worldwide will play out.