Eight months after Google’s former India MD, Rajan Anandan departed to join Sequoia India, the Alphabet-owned search giant has finally found his successor. Sanjay Gupta, who has been leading Disney India and Star India, has been tapped as the India MD for Google.
Gupta was previously heading India businesses for Disney and Disney-owned local broadcaster, Star. He has been among the key personnel who have led aggressive growth for Hotstar — the digital video streaming platform owned by Star, and Netflix/Amazon Prime’s fiercest competitor in the region. Hotstar, under Gupta’s leadership, has emerged as the biggest digital streaming platform in India.
In a statement issued to Moneycontrol, Gupta said, “I am delighted to take on the challenge of leading and shaping Google’s charter in India. It is an exciting opportunity to leverage the power of technology to solve some of India’s unique challenges and make Internet an engine of economic growth for people and communities,” Gupta said in an emailed statement. “I am happy to join the passionate teams across Google and look forward to contributing to India’s digital journey as it becomes an innovation hub for the world.”
Gupta will start leading Google in an era, where fight against fake sources of information, tighter government regulations, and government regulation of the internet have become some of the pressing issues. Political advertising — which forms a large chunk of digital advertising revenue for companies like Facebook, Google — has also been brought into immense questioning.
In terms of the company’s revenues from India, numbers have been largely stagnated. According to data available from RoC, Google’s 2018-19 revenue from sales of advertisements was Rs 9,203 crore, down from previous year. In 2017-18, the company had reported a gross revenue of Rs 9,338.
