Facebook has appointed Umang Bedi as Managing Director of its India operations. Bedi takes over from Kirthiga Reddy, who will return to the US to take on a new role at the company’s headquarters, at Menlo Park.

Bedi will join Facebook after serving as Managing Director of the South Asian region at Adobe for five years. He was responsible for growing Adobe’s business in India by five-fold. Bedi will officially take over in July.

Challenges ahead As Bedi takes charge at Facebook, there are three key things he’ll need to work on.

First, Bedi can create a difference at Facebook by improving the company’s revenues from India. While India is the second largest user base for Facebook, it is not as big when it comes to revenues.

Bedi’s experience in Adobe will be key. Five years ago, it was a similar scenario at Adobe, which wasn’t able to make money in India despite being the most popular software.

Bedi pushed Adobe’s cloud services in India by bringing the cost of its software including Adobe Photoshop to ₹500 per month under a pay-as-you-use model, instead of over ₹76,000 that it used to charge for a licence, in 2011.

Today, India is among the top ten markets for Adobe. Bedi is also extremely well connected in the advertising and marketing world. His relationships with advertising agencies can help Facebook become a prominent advertising medium in the country, which in turn can significantly boost its India revenues. The second key agenda for him will be to rebuild Facebook’s brand image in the country. Facebook received a lot of negative publicity in recent days over its Free Basics offering wherein it partnered with Reliance Communications to offer data packs with free access to limited number of websites. Facebook faced the ire of the netizens and was forced to withdraw the offer after the regulator stepped in.

The third and perhaps the most important thing that Bedi needs to focus on will be to make Facebook relevant for suburban and rural audiences. Facebook has nearly 150 million users in India, and the only way to expand that base is by pushing into the rural market.

One step could be to bring Facebook payments to India and allow Facebook to become a large payments platform in the country, making it simpler for people in villages to get into the banking system.

Other such apps can help making Facebook more relevant among such audiences.

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