All of this is damaging, but the big bombshell fell in November, when Ajit Mohan, the head of Meta India, quit his job. Four years ago, Ajit Mohan arrived at Meta from Hotstar—which he’d practically created from scratch. He’s a legend. And last month, he left Meta to take up a position at Snap. Look, I like Snap. But for perspective, last year, Meta’s overall revenues were around US118billion.Snap’scorrespondingfigurewasUS4 billion. Of that, Snap’s India unit reported a grand total revenue of Rs 32 crore. That’s a little over US$4 million dollars. (View Highlight)
Meta’s India leaders aren’t just quitting, they are practically fleeing . They are going online and writing epic, passionate prose about how much they believe in the company they are running away from. Some are going back to where they came from. Others are leaving to lead companies a fraction of its size. (View Highlight)
There are two ways for Meta to succeed in India. It can either invest time and do it slowly, sustainably at a rapid pace. Or it can invest money and er… move fast and break things.
Meta has chosen the first option. It has opted for time over money. (View Highlight)
Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday that WhatsApp and Messenger would drive the company’s next wave of sales growth, as he sought to assuage concerns about Meta’s finances after its first mass layoffs. (View Highlight)
Zuckerberg, addressing pointed questions at a company-wide meeting a week after Meta said it would lay off 11,000 workers, described the pair of messaging apps as being “very early in monetizing” compared to its advertising juggernauts Facebook and Instagram, according to remarks heard by Reuters. (View Highlight)
First, WhatsApp can make money using payments. (View Highlight)
Well, you know this story. For years and years, as UPI became more persuasive, companies like PhonePe, Amazon, and Google jumped in to build payment apps. Winning market share was expensive. And all of them had one nightmare scenario. They were convinced that WhatsApp was the sleeping giant, and if it woke up and enabled UPI payments—a relatively simple integration—there would be just one winner. (View Highlight)
All of their major competitors had had a five-year head start, and yet, many smart people were convinced that WhatsApp would still emerge as a significant player. (View Highlight)
According to experts tracking the UPI ecosystem, the primary reason for the decline in number is the removal of cashback offers by WhatsApp which pulled discount hunters to the app. (View Highlight)
Which brings me to the second path: shopping. (View Highlight)
Look, I’ve written about this before . A few months ago, Reliance and Meta collaborated to work on something fairly revolutionary (their words, not mine). They described it as “the first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp”. The idea was that users could browse products on JioMart, add them to a cart, and make a purchase, all without having to leave WhatsApp. (View Highlight)
All of which brings us to WhatsApp’s biggest bet.
WhatsApp for Business. (View Highlight)
At its core, WhatsApp for Business is a combination of a marketing platform plus conversational messaging platform and a CRM. A lot of companies simply want to communicate with their customers, send them notifications and collect payments. Today, they do that using SMS and email. WhatsApp for Business is meant to be a superior alternative. (View Highlight)
There are many good reasons why Meta is bullish on this approach. WhatsApp for Business is almost like a SaaS platform, and sidesteps all the messy content moderation stuff which they’re currently saddled with. There’s little regulatory overload. (View Highlight)
But most importantly, he triangulates their revenue in India at around US128million.Accordingtohisreporting,thisisroughly20−30500 million. From Meta’s standpoint, this is nothing. No wonder they don’t seem to talk much about the numbers. Of course, there are talks about how fast this revenue is growing. One news report claimed that this is on course to hit a billion dollars next year in India. Again, I’m somewhat sceptical. I’ve never seen a projection in the future that didn’t appear rosy. (View Highlight)
As Pratap points out, the big barrier to growth is actually in WhatsApp for Business’s pricing. (View Highlight)
Still, not everything can be fully tested in a sandbox. The BPCL tie-up, for instance, is riddled with challenges—starting with pricing. It’ll need to match the price of text messaging at Rs 0.09 (US$0.0012)—that’s one-fifth of WhatsApp’s rates. It’ll also need to maintain some quality in the chatbot’s communication. After all, no one wants a repeat of SMS spam. (View Highlight)
According to a former WhatsApp executive, most messages and conversations are generated by a handful of businesses on the app. “There is an overdependence on such businesses. It is worrisome for the WhatsApp India team, and it has been planning to resolve this as it’s chasing a target of 32 million conversations (or sessions) daily by June.” (View Highlight)
All of this probably gives you some sense of what’s going on. To win in payments, WhatsApp needs to invest a ton of money to acquire customers. Which it started, and then scaled back. To win in shopping, well, that also needs a ton of investments, to find all the stores and to integrate them. And WhatsApp for Business needs money to subsidise pricing to claw market share away from SMS in the cheapest telecom market in the world. (View Highlight)
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