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Anand Chandrasekaran, who recently left his post as chief product officer at carrier Bharti Airtel, is joining Indian e-commerce site Snapdeal in a similar post.
“It’s a great time in India to jump into something entrepreneurial and I couldn’t imagine a better company to join,” Chandrasekaran told Re/code.
Snapdeal is one of the three biggest shopping sites in India which, along with competitors Flipkart and Amazon, is leading the way in building one of the most exciting e-commerce markets in the world. The market is relatively small today, but it is expected to grow by at least 50 percent in each of the next three years. That fast growth is being fueled by the proliferation of smartphones in the country, as lower-priced phones and cheap data plans have made shopping online more attractive to a broad group of people.
Snapdeal is backed by eBay and SoftBank, among other international firms, and was most recently valued at around $5 billion. It has also held discussions with Alibaba about a new investment, but a deal has not been reached.
The move comes as several big Indian tech startups look to big American firms to poach senior executives. In the last two months, for example, competitor Flipkart started to hire executives with big-company experience in the U.S., bringing on two Google executives recently to become product chief and engineering head.
Chandrasekaran worked for Yahoo in Silicon Valley before moving to India last year.
Chandrasekaran wrote a piece for Re/code last year talking about the move and also appeared onstage at Code/Mobile last year.
Here’s a video of that interview:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
