The Man Who Managed Samsung’s India Headaches Just Quit

NEW DELHI — Rajiv Aggarwal knew where the bodies were buried in India’s government. He spent years inside it as a senior bureaucrat before crossing to the private sector — first at Uber, then at Meta, and since late 2022 at Samsung India, where he served as head of public affairs and ESG: the executive responsible for keeping one of the world’s most powerful technology companies on the right side of one of the world’s most demanding governments.

On Tuesday, he resigned.

Two sources with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed to Reuters that Aggarwal, 57, has stepped down after nearly four years in the role and is serving his final week at Samsung India. The reason for his departure is unknown. Aggarwal declined to comment. Samsung Electronics did not respond to queries.

He was, in every practical sense, Samsung’s man in New Delhi — the human bridge between a South Korean conglomerate selling tens of millions of smartphones a year in India and the Modi government that controls the regulatory environment in which it operates. His departure leaves that bridge unmanned at a moment when Samsung needs it most.

The timing is notable. Samsung is currently locked in two significant policy battles with Indian authorities that require exactly the kind of government relationship management Aggarwal was hired to provide.

The first is a dispute over pre-installation of state-run applications. India’s government has demanded that smartphone manufacturers — Samsung and Apple chief among them — pre-install government applications on devices sold in the country. Both companies have pushed back on privacy grounds. The standoff has become a test of how firmly global technology companies will resist India’s regulatory muscle when the world’s most populous country and one of its fastest-growing smartphone markets is the prize at stake.

The second is a legal challenge Samsung has joined against Indian government policy that significantly increases manufacturers’ financial obligations toward electronic-waste recyclers — a cost the industry argues is commercially unsustainable.

Aggarwal was the man navigating both disputes. He joined Samsung from Meta, where he had served as India’s public policy head before departing in late 2022 during a period of senior leadership exits from Meta’s Indian operations. Before his corporate career, he spent years in the Indian Administrative Service — the elite bureaucratic corps that sits at the apex of India’s civil service — giving him the institutional relationships and procedural knowledge that make a good government affairs executive invaluable and a great one irreplaceable.

Samsung has not named a successor. It has not explained his exit. It has not commented at all.

For a company whose India business depends on managing a government that has shown it is willing to use market access as leverage — demanding pre-installed apps, reshaping e-waste economics, extracting manufacturing commitments through incentive schemes — the absence of a senior public affairs head is not a gap that stays comfortable for long.

India is Samsung’s most complex regulatory environment. The person who understood it best just walked out the door.

SOURCE REUTERS