Brands
91Brands names Sumit S Suneja director for growth & partnerships
MUMBAI: Consumer brands platform 91Brands has appointed retail and expansion specialist Sumit S Suneja as founding member and director for growth and partnerships, marking a key early leadership move for the company.
Announcing the development, Suneja said he was excited to begin a new chapter with 91Brands, signalling his return to an entrepreneurial, build-from-the-ground-up role after a long corporate stint. His mandate will focus on accelerating growth, forging strategic partnerships and shaping the company’s market expansion roadmap.
Suneja brings over two decades of experience across retail, franchising, real estate and international markets. Most recently, he spent more than 16 years at Bestseller India, where he served as chief expansion officer and head of international markets, overseeing large-scale retail growth and cross-border expansion. Earlier in his career, he led the launch and scale-up of Cocoberry, India’s first premium non-fat frozen yoghurt brand, and founded Siters Retail Solutions, advising brands on retail, real estate and franchise strategy.
With deep expertise in building brands, negotiating complex deals and scaling businesses across geographies, Suneja’s appointment adds seasoned heft to 91Brands’ founding team as it sets out to build its next phase of growth.
Brands
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.
