Social networking giant Facebook has appointed Umang Bedi as its new Managing Director for Indian operations, where he will lead in building and maintaining strategic relationships with top clients and regional agencies in the country.
Bedi will be taking over from Kirthiga Reddy, is returning to the US for a new role at the company’s headquarters. She will be managing Facebook's relationships with the world's largest global advertisers at Menlo Park.
"After six years in India building our operations and business, it's hard to leave a team I now call family. As I look ahead, I am excited about how well positioned our business is, to grow from strength to strength with Umang's leadership," she said.
Umang will officially start at Facebook in July and Kirthiga will commence her new role from August.
Before Facebook, Umang Bedi was the Managing Director of Adobe, South Asia region and was responsible for the growth of the company’s business in India.
He has close to two decades of leadership experience covering sales, marketing and partnerships where he successfully built teams and grew businesses for multinational companies.
"India is known for its great talent pool and we are really pleased to have Umang, a proven business executive to lead our business in India. I also want to wish Kirthiga the very best in her new global role. Kirthiga has played a huge and key role in building our India business from scratch, and I know she will continue to deliver the same impact in the US," said Dan Neary, VP Asia Pacific in Facebook.
"I am thrilled to join Facebook and am looking forward to working with the talented teams in India, to help brands and agencies grow their business on our platform. For me it’s a promising opportunity to participate in India’s digital growth, and I can’t think of a better place to be at," Bedi said.
Bedi is an engineering graduate from University of Pune, and an alumni of Harvard Business School.
Reddy's transfer was seen connected with Facebook’s failure to gain popular support for its Free Basics project, which was eventually halted after the TRAI’s decision.
However, Facebook, has denied the Free Basics fiasco had anything to do with the change of Managing Director.
Indian regulators have effectively blocked Free Basics, a controversial Facebook online service that sought to bring free access to a limited version of the social network and other sites to the country's poorest people.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India outlawed charging different prices for downloading different kinds of internet content.
The ruling, which regulators said was guided by the principles of net neutrality, was a major setback for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, who had lobbied hard for the programme as part of multi-million dollar advertising campaign across all the media platforms campaign to expand Internet access to billions of people around the world.
