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KFC and Pizza Hut operator appoints Manish Dawar as CEO
GURUGRAM: Devyani International, the operator of KFC and Pizza Hut in India, has picked Manish Dawar as its next chief executive, handing the keys to its finance head at a testing moment for the business.
Dawar, cfo since 2021, will take charge from April 1, replacing Viraj Joshi, who shifts to a non-executive director role. The move keeps the succession in-house and signals a preference for financial discipline over flashy expansion.
The finance seat will not stay empty for long. Anupam Kumar, currently executive vice president – finance, is set to become cfo, completing a tightly managed shuffle at the top.
The backdrop is less than cosy. The company recently posted a sharp rise in quarterly losses, underlining pressure on margins in India’s crowded quick-service restaurant market, where discounting and delivery costs gnaw at profits.
At the same time, Devyani is swinging big on scale, announcing a $934m merger with Sapphire Foods, another major franchisee in the sector. The deal aims to bulk up store count, boost bargaining power and squeeze efficiencies from procurement to logistics.
Investors will be watching whether a numbers man in the corner office can steady earnings while digesting a large merger. In India’s fast-food wars, growth is easy to order; profits are harder to serve.
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Samsung certifies 1,000 Maharashtra students in AI and coding
The South Korean electronics giant marks its first large-scale skilling push in the state, with women making up nearly half the national programme’s enrolment
PUNE: Samsung has put 1,000 students in Maharashtra through a certified training programme in artificial intelligence and coding, the largest such drive the South Korean electronics company has run in the state and a signal that corporate India’s skilling ambitions are moving well beyond the boardroom brochure.
The certifications were awarded under Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), the company’s flagship corporate social responsibility programme, which launched in India in 2022 with the stated aim of democratising access to future-technology education. The 1,000 graduates were drawn from four institutions: 127 from Savitribai Phule Pune University, 373 from Pimpri Chinchwad University, 250 from D.Y. Patil University’s Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology and 250 from Anjuman-I-Islam’s Kalsekar Technical Campus. All completed training in either AI or coding and programming, the two disciplines Samsung has identified as the critical pillars of the digital economy.
The programme does not stop at technical training. Soft-skills development and career-readiness modules are baked into the curriculum, a deliberate attempt to close the gap between what universities teach and what employers actually want.
“India’s digital growth story will ultimately be shaped by the quality of its talent pipeline,” said Shubham Mukherjee, head of CSR and corporate communications at Samsung Southwest Asia. “As technologies like AI move from the periphery to the core of industries, skilling must evolve from basic training to building real-world capability. This milestone in Maharashtra reflects how industry and academia can come together to create a future-ready workforce that is both globally competitive and locally relevant.”
The Maharashtra drive sits within a rapidly scaling national effort. Samsung Innovation Campus trained 20,000 young people across India in 2025, hitting its stated target for the year. Women account for 48 per cent of national enrolments, a figure the company cites as evidence of its push for an inclusive technology ecosystem. The programme is implemented in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India and the Telecom Sector Skill Council.
Samsung, which is marking 30 years in India this year, runs SIC alongside two other initiatives, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow and Samsung DOST, as part of a broader effort to build what it calls a generation of innovators with both the technical depth and the problem-solving mindset to thrive in a fast-moving digital world.
A thousand certified students is a tidy headline. Whether they find jobs that match their new skills is the harder question, and the one that will ultimately determine whether corporate skilling programmes like this one are genuine pipelines or well-photographed gestures.
