Meta India Head Ajit Mohan Resigns, Joins Rival Snap

Ajit Mohan, who was the head of Meta in India, has left the company to join rival social media company Snap. Mohan has assumed the position of President of the APAC business at Snap, the company revealed on Thursday. Mohan joined Facebook in January 2019 as Vice President and Managing Director of its India business. Since then, Facebook has undergone several changes including a change under parent company Meta. During his tenure, Mohan played a key role in the Meta family of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp, adding more than 200 million users in India.

Meta confirmed the exit of its India head on Thursday. “Ajit has decided to step down from his position at Meta to pursue another opportunity outside the company,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, Meta’s Global Business Group Vice President, in a statement.

Prior to joining Facebook, Mohan held the position of Senior Vice President at Star TV, where he helped launch Hotstar, its digital streaming service. Mohan later led Hotstar as CEO for four years before finally joining Facebook in 2019. At Star, he played a key role in localizing Hotstar’s content strategy, which included banking on local movies, original shows, and acquiring sports broadcasting rights. .at major sporting events in the country.

“Over the past four years, you have played a key role in shaping and growing our India operations to serve millions of Indian businesses, partners and people. We are deeply committed to India and have a strong leadership team in place to drive forward all of our work and partnerships. We appreciate Ajit’s leadership and contribution and wish him the best for the future,” Mendelsohn added in his statement.

Snap confirmed in a statement to Gadgets 360 that Mohan will join the company from Meta, as president of Snap’s APAC business.

Mohan has joined Snap’s executive team and will lead Snap’s businesses in India, Australia and New Zealand, China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Korea.

“We believe Ajit’s leadership will enable us to accelerate our growth across APAC, and we couldn’t be more excited to have Ajit join the Snap team,” said Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap in a prepared statement.

Mohan will join Snap at a particularly tumultuous time for the company, which has seen its shares fall nearly 25 percent in the past month after forecasting a lack of revenue for the current quarter. Mohan would look to overturn the fortunes of Snap, which has cited a faltering economy and stiff competition as the reason for its decline in growth.

Snapchat has reached 100 million active users (MAUs) in India by 2021, and the company has partnered with platforms like Flipkart and Zomato in the country. The company says it is looking to target users in the APAC region, which includes about 75 percent of smartphone users over the age of 13, who have yet to use a messaging platform.