Meta India’s Vice President and Head, Ms. Sandhya Devanathan, has been recently appointed to head the company’s operations across Southeast Asia along with her current role. So, who is Sandhya Devanathan- a leader whose name is now being echoed in tech sectors around the world?
Sandhya is a global leader who has years of experience in leading businesses, scaling their reach, driving product innovation and building strong teams. She has over two decades of experience in various sectors including banking, payments and technology at an international level.
Rising up the ranks at Meta
Sandhya joined Meta (formerly known as Facebook) in 2016 and within six years, in 2022, she was appointed as the Vice president and Head of Meta India. During her tenure, Sandhya led multiple key operations for Meta successfully, contributing to the tech giant’s growth. She is a key leader who built Meta’s business teams in Singapore and Vietnam, strengthening the company’s presence in these regions. She also helped establish Meta’s e-commerce initiatives in Southeast Asia.
In 2020, Sandhya was appointed as the head of Meta’s gaming division for APAC, with gaming being one of the company’s top three verticals globally. She has played a pivotal role in scaling Meta’s hold over the gaming market in India and has reiterated that India is a key market for the industry with a large section of the population being under 25. Taking this up as an opportunity, she also projected gaming as the driver of India’s next wave of digital growth. Even in 2024, she reiterated her bet on the potential of this industry and highlighted projections of there being 700 million gamers by 2028 and the industry’s potential to generate around 300,000 jobs.
Sandhya Devanathan took up leadership as Meta’s India Head during turbulent times for the global social media industry at large. The company had just gone through several rounds of layoffs globally, which also included laying off key leadership team members in the Indian market. However, Sandhya took up this challenge as an opportunity and spearheaded Meta’s growth in India and internationally.
India is one of Meta’s key targets, with the Indian market serving as a pivotal experimenting ground for its innovations. Many of Meta’s social media features such as Instagram Reels were first announced in India before these features went live globally. Since her appointment as the India head, Sandhya has been central to Meta’s strategy building in the region as well as in aligning the Indian strategy with the company’s global priorities in the big picture.
Leadership Focus
Partnerships are a core element of Sandhya Devanathan’s leadership style, with her emphasis on prioritising collaboration with various industry players- small and big. Under her leadership, Meta has strategically expanded its partnerships, with the goal of understanding how Meta can add value to the industry. In 2023, Meta entered a collaboration with IndiaAI with the objective of advancing AI development and innovation in India. Soon after, Meta partnered with the Press Trust of India (PTI ) in 2024 to expand its third-party fact-checking collaborations in the country. Moreover, Meta has been spearheading the trend of collaborating with content creators for the launch of new campaigns and products, making the advertising closer to their target audience.
Sandhya believes in the importance of partnerships in driving innovations, and led the company to work with developers, brands and creators to build tools which make content creation more accessible and impactful.
Sandhya Devanathan beyond Meta
Sandhya Devanathan comes from Visakhapatnam, a coastal city in Andhra Pradesh, India. She has an extensive academic background, with an undergraduate degree in Bachelor of Technology (BT), a Master in Business Administration (MBA), and a leadership training course at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School in the United Kingdom.
Before joining Meta, Sandhya has worked with multiple organisations such as Standard Chartered Bank and Citi. These are experiences which have shaped her professional prowess and inform her leadership till date.
She is also a member of the global board at USIBC and Singapore’s National Library Board, a board observer at Jio Platforms, and a national steerco member FICCI.
A leader’s core beliefs for the community
Sandhya has time and again voiced her commitment to gender diversity and inclusion at the workplace. She is the Executive Sponsor for Women@APAC at Meta, an initiative to support women in leadership positions. She also leads a global program called “Play Forward,” which aims to bring more people from different backgrounds into the gaming industry.
Sandhya also has tremendous faith in the capabilities of technology, and identifies as a “huge believer in tech’s ability to drive value for businesses of all sizes, and the role it could play in building strong communities that connect all of us.”
