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Journalism of Courage
Facebook parent Meta’s India head Ajit Mohan has stepped down from his position with immediate effect nearly after four years of joining the tech giant. Mohan is learnt to have joined rival company Snap as the president of its Asia Pacific business.
Manish Chopra, director and head of partnerships at Meta India, will take over in an interim capacity.
Mohan joined Meta, then called Facebook, in January 2019 as vice president and managing director of its India business. During his stint, the company made a number of strategic investments in Indian businesses, including picking up close to a 10 per cent stake in telecom giant Reliance Jio. Meta’s family of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp also added around 300 million users in that time as Facebook used India to test and launch key services including Reels, its TikTok-rivalling short video offering. Facebook’s net profit in India in FY’22 grew by 132 per cent year on year to Rs 297 crore.
Under him, the social media juggernaut was also questioned of its content moderation policies after Ankhi Das, Facebook’s former India policy head, was alleged to interfere in how the company enforced its hate-speech policy in the country.
Mohan was also the key driving force behind launching the streaming platform Hotstar during his previous stint at Star.
He joins Snap as the company looks to ramp up its presence in India and launch a number of localised services in the country. The platform crossed the milestone of 100 million users in India back in October last year. Snap has also announced a slew of partnerships with local players to monetise its platform, including a tie-up with Flipkart to develop augmented reality (AR) experiences for the ecommerce company.
