Snap’s Ajit Mohan: Now that we have the scale, it is time to build a business around it

At a time when most big tech firms are firing employees in India, Snap Inc., parent of the visual messaging app Snapchat, is hiring.

In his first television interview since switching to Snap from Meta, parent of Facebook, four months ago, Ajit Mohan, president of APAC at Snap, shared the company’s aggressive growth plan and vision for India.

In the interview with Storyboard18’s editor Delshad Irani, Mohan said: “The company has now 200 million snapchatters in India. Most of that growth has happened in the last 3-4 years. Our agenda in India is to continue the growth. A lot of the focus in the last 3-4 years was establishing Snapchat’s presence in India and ensuring people specially teens understood the proposition of Snapchat.”

He added: “Now that we have the scale, it is time to build a business around it. There is a huge opportunity to be useful to marketers and companies. In many ways we are leaders of AR (Augmented Reality) around the world.”

Snapchat is going for fairly aggressive hiring even with Big Tech in trouble and mass layoffs at the beginning of 2023. As the Snapchat community continues to grow in India, Snap is building its team and enhancing operations with hires across a variety of roles to better serve the Indian Snapchatter community.

Mohan said: “We are hiring across the board. We have a content and growth and partnership team which has been here for the last few years. We will continue to invest behind that. We are spending time localising the product for India. We are building a business team. Connecting the dots for these is the hiring of a new leader for India. We could not be more optimistic about India.”

The company is re-accelerating growth to kick-start its ad revenue engine in the region as it gets bullish about its prospects in markets like India. The company also shared that it hit a milestone of 200 million monthly users in India. At present, more than 120 million Indian Snapchatters are watching content across Stories and Spotlight, the fourth and fifth tabs of the app, highlighting Snapchat’s focus on relevance to local users.

Snap’s commitment to democratising the use and creation of AR has resonated with Indian Snapchatters, the company said. They often utilise Snapchat AR to celebrate cultural moments. In India, Snapchatters play with AR Lenses over 50 billion times every month, and over 85 percent of Snapchatters use Lenses to visually express themselves during festive months in India.

Spotlight, Snapchat's user-generated entertainment platform, continues significant growth with time spent in India on Spotlight more than tripling. The company is pushing these features to increase engagement and empower a new generation of creators to build audiences via Snapchat while making their passion for content creation monetizable and accessible.

Watch out for the interview with Ajit Mohan where he outlines his plans and talks AR and AI, on Media Dialogues With Storyboard18 on CNBC-TV18.