Kirthiga Reddy is the face of Facebook in India. As the director of online operations and Head of Office India at Facebook India, she has catapulted the social networking giant?s India operations to one of prominence throughout its global operations. Reddy is an experienced technologist, having created and built several successful tech ventures. Prior to Facebook, she was VP and GM of the Consumer Security business unit and India operations at Phoenix Technologies. She led a global team located in US, India, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Before Phoenix, Reddy was with Motorola Good Technology for over six years. She was based out of Silicon Valley where she led global product management. Reddy has also held the position of director of engineering at Silicon Graphics and associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. Extremely passionate about children?s causes and in developing women leaders, this MBA from Stanford University tells BV Mahalakshmi that women often tend to underestimate themselves. They need to think high about their careers, she stresses in a recent interaction. Excerpts:
You seem to be quite passionate about developing women leaders…
In Facebook, women can surely think high about their careers. We do not have night shifts across our offices but can still manage round-the-clock services. Women tend to underestimate themselves. Studies have proven that only a handful of women are prepared to leave their jobs when they are offered another exciting opportunity. A majority of them are hesitant to take up a new assignment in spite of the prospects and excitement it offers.
Failure to negotiate effectively over their prospects is another area that needs to be addressed. While men overestimate their performance, women often underestimate the amount of work and their contribution that they do for the organisation. Less than 5% of women are succeeding in reaching higher positions as they are averse to think about choices. As a result, the number parity witnessed at entry level jobs could not be seen at the higher levels where the number of women becomes slimmer.
At Facebook, we have an equal mix of both men and women and have an open policy to express ideas irrespective of the positions.
How important is India for Facebook? What will be the company?s strategy to grow operations here?
We are scaling up our operations in India through the Hyderabad centre. Facebook India has grown from eight million users to 50 million users in the country; the social networking site has turned out to be an effective communication tool for users on the move. This is evident from the significant increase in the number of mobile phone owners who constitute the major part of Facebook?s users. We are seeing an exponential growth in recent months and we find that the trend is fast moving towards mobile from the desktop with increasing broadband penetration in the country.
Globally, there are over 901 million monthly active users at the end of March 2012. Approximately 80% of our monthly active users are outside the US and Canada. On an average, about 526 million are daily active users. The India office supports the company?s growing number of users, advertisers and developers worldwide who are capitalising on Facebook?s service to foster relationships with people and reach out to new customers locally and internationally.
What are the opportunities that you see in the Indian market?
We see the trend of users accessing Facebook accounts on their mobiles than on their desktops. Most of the regional language users access Facebook on their mobiles; about 50 million Facebook users are on mobile. Unlike in the US where most of the people started on the desktop and moved to mobile, in India, it is causing us to rethink our model. Here, people are going to Facebook first on their mobiles and not on the desktop computers.
We are working out on innovative ideas to improve the access to the Facebook site through mobiles. We have launched Facebook (application) for every phone. In the process, we are working on language translation which is available in eight languages for India users which include Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi and Hindi. Sanskrit is also on the cards. We have more than 800 million monthly active users and over 350 million mobile users worldwide. There are an estimated 488 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in March 2012. There are more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 20, 2012.
With the translation tools in place, we are also looking at the rural segment. For instance, a turmeric farmer in Maharashtra could fix prices for his produce after logging into our site. We have partnerships with operators and mobile handset makers to spread the concept of social media across the rural users.
Of late, Facebook has been facing privacy and security issues. Any comments?
On the issue of safety and minors opening Facebook accounts, our policy is not to allow people under the age of 13. We look into violations and take right action to check this. We have robust controls in place. But the entire effort needs a lot of awareness and education. We help in making meaningful connections.
We are seeing a significant amount of traction in the advertisement and e-commerce segments. We will be investing more in innovative thoughts to push e-commerce in the FMCG, auto and education segments besides other sectors.
