Zuckerberg to visit India later this month, meet Modi

After Sheryl Sandberg, its now the turn of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to visit India, the second biggest market for the social networking giant, later in October.

After Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Micrsoft’s Satya Nadella, it’s now the turn of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to visit India.

Zuckerberg, who is slated to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will be in the country to address the first Internet.org summit taking place on October 9-10 in the city. India is Facebook’s second-biggest market after the US.

The young billionaire is expected to meet members of other key ministries as well. This will be the third highprofile visit by a CEO of a US-based company.

Zuckerberg, who recently snapped up the popular instant messaging service company Whatsapp early this year, joins the growing list of global corporate leaders focusing on India as a major market.

With over one billion users globally, the company gets over 100 million users from India. Many of these users log onto the networking site from their mobile devices.

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg had met Modi earlier this year.

The meeting with Zuckerberg assumes significance in the backdrop of Sandberg’s discussion with the Prime Minister. Sandberg had suggested the use of Facebook for improving governance, better interaction between people and the government, and for attracting more tourists to India.

Internet.Org aims to make Internet access affordable for people across the globe. Focussed on enabling the next five billion people to come online, the founding members of the project include Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.