Ajit Mohan's switch: Not the first time that Snap has poached Meta India executives
Gaurav Jain, the former head of growth at Meta India, also joined Snap as its head of emerging business earlier this year
On Thursday, Meta India chief Ajit Mohan, in a surprise move, announced that he was stepping down and joining rival Snap Inc, which is making steady inroads in the world’s second-largest internet market.
Mohan will join the social media company in February 2023. As APAC president, he will head the region’s overall business, oversee all local operations, and lead go-to-market strategy.
This is not the first time that Snap has poached Meta’s staff. The parent company of Facebook has lost several of its senior executives to Snap over the past three years.
Early this year, Gaurav Jain, the former head of growth at Meta India, also joined Snap as its head of emerging business. Jain is responsible for driving revenue growth by offering solutions to brands, agencies, and sales partners.
In 2019, the then Meta India head Durgesh Kaushik joined Snap as its managing director for South Asia. Kaushik, however, left Snap in April this year and has now joined Coinbase.
A year ago, Snap had also poached Aishwarya Rao, the then agency partner of Meta, as its global business expansion lead. She has possibly left the company now, as reflected in her current LinkedIn profile.
As part of its growing focus on India, Snap Inc, the parent company of ephemeral messaging service Snapchat, has made major hiring for its growth, advertising partnerships, and augmented reality (AR) teams.
Even globally, Snap had poached top FB executives to expand its ad business. Sriram Krishnan, who has been entrusted by Elon Musk to revamp Twitter recently, was Facebook Audience Network executive when Snap hired him to run its Ads API and platform.
Small, but growing
Founded by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown in 2011, Snap is growing gradually across the world making its giant rivals take note.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had reportedly made multiple acquisition offers in the past to acquire Snap. Later, he ripped pages out of Snapchat’s playbook intensifying the rivalry.
This was a multi-front war. Facebook added new ‘camera filters’ and an ephemeral sharing feature called ‘Stories’ in 2017 that mirrored what Snapchat offered. Later, stories and other features were incorporated in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps as well.
Snap reached 100 million users in India in October 2021, its largest market outside the US. Most of its users fall in the age group of 13-24 years. Snap seeks to grab the Indian market space occupied by Meta India with more than 350 million user base.
Both California-based platforms are also competing for advertising money in India, which crossed Rs 73,000 crore in 2021, as per the Pitch Madison Annual report 2022 and is expected to grow further even as the global ad pool is shrinking due to recession.
Meta stocks lost more than $730 billion of its market value within a year. The company’s current revenue stands at $27.71 billion, a 4% less in the third quarter Y-O-Y.
Snap is still showing revenue growth globally. It recently reported a 6% rise in the third quarter Y-O-Y with total revenue of $1.13 billion.
India Push
As Meta forged a $5.7 billion investment into Jio Platforms and Meesho in India, Snap too forged some crucial partnerships to accelerate its growth in India, its largest market outside the US. It has been onboarding creators in non-metro markets to boost app engagement and the advertising business.
In 2021, it partnered with Indian short-video application Moj and enabled its AR technology to be used within Flipkart, where online shoppers can virtually try Nike shoes. It also joined hands with game developer Moonfrog Labs, e-commerce brands Sugar Cosmetics and MyGlamm, and several media channels, including Sony and Zee.
