Abhijit Bose, Head of India at WhatsApp and Rajiv Agrawal, Meta’s India policy head, have both quit. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the departures. Entrackr heard from a source that Agrawal had decided to quit last month, but the company denied the departure at that time. Manish Chopra, Director of Partnerships at Meta India, said that Agrawal had left to pursue “another opportunity”.
Shivnath Thukral, WhatsApp’s public policy director, will take over Agrawal’s role.
“There is so much more WhatsApp can do for India and we’re excited to continue helping advance India’s digital transformation,” Will Cathcart, who heads WhatsApp globally, said in a statement. Bose was WhatsApp’s first India head.
Meta’s India head Ajit Mohan left the company to join rival platform Snap at the beginning of this month.
WhatsApp India is slowly emerging as a source of significant revenue for Meta, even though its massive scale likely costs it a lot more than what it is currently making. Moneycontrol cited unnamed sources to report this month that the messaging platform was nearing a billion dollars in revenue from India.
That comes out to around $2 per user in India. This revenue mostly comes from businesses paying to send promotional messages to users. As for WhatsApp’s UPI payment service, the company has been tied down by quotas on how many users can sign up for it. The National Payments Corporation of India started out by allowing WhatsApp to onboard 20 million users, then 40 million, and as of April this year, 60 million users can sign up for the service.
Meta isn’t currently heavily promoting payments just yet. The company only launched an ad campaign for the service in July, and a YouTube ad has garnered less than 25,000 views as of this reporting, indicating that the company isn’t spending significantly to boost its advertising.
Analysis by Fintrackr shows that in spite of a temporary spike in transaction numbers in June, the service has continued to account for a small slice of the overall UPI payment pie. In August, WhatsApp accounted for only 0.09% of all UPI payments in terms of transaction count.
