Harnessing India's talent to help Facebook grow globally, says COO Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and is ninth of Forbes’ most powerful women in the world, was on a visit to India this week. She gave an interview to CNBC-TV18’s Executive Editor Shereen Bhan discussing the importance of India for Facebook as well as the role of women in the technology sector.   When asked about what makes her so confident and so bullish about India, not just from the Facebook point of view also as an emerging market, Sandberg said it was the change she seen in the country over the last few decades.   She told CNBC-Tv18 that, “When I used to come here in the early 1990s there was no internet. Today both in my experience at Google and now in my experience at Facebook, India is not just a place that is growing its own economy but we have one of our four global centres of operations here. We are using the talent of India to grow our business here but also to grow our business around the world.”   Sheryl whose book Lean In, which deals with women in the workplace was also asked about why the tech industry continues to be a largely male-dominated space.   According to Sandberg, “Tech has a specific problem which is that such a small percentage of women going into computer science. However I will give you something optimistic, our operations in India are being lead by two women, our two most senior employees are women, Ankhi Das who runs our public policy, Kirthiga Reddy who runs our global sales, that is an example that we can follow. As I was visiting our offices here I was so proud that we have so many women at all levels of the organisation, including the top.”

  During the course of her India visit, Sandberg also spoke about how the importance of India for Facebook. She said , “India is Facebook’s second largest market, fastest growing market, fastest growing Internet connectivity in APAC. It is of high priority for us.”   Sandberg’s comments on India come as the company has introduced a new plan to boost revenue from this country. According to a Reuters report, “Facebook s testing a new type of ad in India that allows mobile phone users to click a button that calls a brand advertiser, immediately hangs up and then receives a return call.” The return call delivers pre-recorded audio messages about everything from sponsored cricket scores to information about shopping discounts, minimising data charges for the user.