BlackBerry's Sunil Lalvani joins Qualcomm India as vice president

Sunil Lalvani, who resigned as BlackBerry India's managing director last month, has joined Nasdaq-listed chip manufacturer Qualcomm Technologies as vice president, and president of its India operations. Lalvani's appointment is effective from 27 July.

He will report directly to Cristiano Amon, executive vice president and co-president, Qualcomm Technologies. He replaces Avneesh Agrawal, senior vice president and president of Qualcomm India and South Asia, who quit after a 21-year-long stint, the company said in a statement.

''I am pleased to welcome Sunil Lalvani as vice president and president of Qualcomm India. His broad industry experience and extensive leadership experience will enable us to strengthen existing strategic relationships, identify new opportunities for business growth and build new relationships in India,'' Amon said.

"Under Avneesh's leadership, Qualcomm led a number of successful efforts to nurture the local ecosystem in India, including accelerating 3G smartphone adoption and 4G LTE deployment, helping Indian brands build new revenue streams and establishing Qualcomm as the premier technology brand in India's telecom and handset ecosystem. I'd like to thank Avneesh for all of his contributions to these successes," he added.

Lalvani, who has more than 20 years of experience in sales, business development, strategic planning and business operations across IT and telecom sectors, Was previously managing director of India and SAARC at BlackBerry. In this role, Lalvani was responsible for overseeing and driving BlackBerry's overall business strategy and growth in India and was focused on driving differentiated solutions for consumers and enterprise customers.

Lalvani was also instrumental in leading a strong engagement with carrier  partners and ISVs in India.

Prior to being the managing director, Lalvani was Director of Enterprise Sales at BlackBerry. Earlier, he had also worked with EMC Corp, Nokia, Cisco Systems and SITA Equant Network (now Orange Business Services).