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Facebook Messenger hires exec with India ties

Jessica Guynn
USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook's popular Messenger app has hired a prominent executive with strong ties to India, underscoring how important that country is to the tech giant's growth.

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, left, poses for photos with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook in Menlo Park, Calif., in September 2015.

Anand Chandrasekaran, a former Yahoo executive who most recently was chief product officer at Snapdeal, an e-commerce start-up in India, will assume a global leadership role at Messenger out of Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters, focusing on strategy and partnerships.

Chandrasekaran confirmed the move in a Facebook post. Facebook could not be immediately reached for comment.

Without access to China, India has become a critical market for Facebook and other major U.S. tech companies. It's second only to the U.S. in Facebook users, and is poised for a major growth spurt with hundreds of millions of people not yet online.

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Facebook is placing a major bet on messaging as the next major platform, envisioning its popular messaging app Messenger as a central hub for people's daily lives and interactions. To that end, Messenger, which hit 1 billion users in July, is tapping into the popularity of chatbots in Asia, where messaging services such as Tencent's WeChat help users schedule doctor's appointments, shop for shoes, play games or the lottery and send money to friends, all from within the app.

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"Messenger is going to be the next big platform for sharing privately," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the company's annual F8 conference for software developers in April.

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Facebook has stumbled in India. In February, Indian regulators blocked Free Basics, a controversial Facebook service championed by Zuckerberg that gave people there free but limited access to the Internet on mobile devices. Critics argued that the service violated the principle of network neutrality.

"Connecting India is an important goal we won't give up on, because more than a billion people in India don't have access to the Internet," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post at the time.

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