Brands
Amul to invest Rs 5000-crore in expansion to achieve 2020 revenue target: RS Sodhi
MUMBAI: A household name in India, Amul, will invest Rs 5,000 crore to set up around 10 milk processing plants in the next financial year including two plants in Delhi, three in Uttar Pradesh, one each in Kolkata and Maharashtra and the rest in Gujarat.
“The endeavour is to achieve its revenue target of Rs 50,000 crore by 2020,” said Amul managing director RS Sodhi.
Speaking at an interactive session on the third and final day at the India Food Forum 2015, Sodhi, in conversation with Future Retail CEO Sadashiv Nayak, said, “Amul will be able to achieve annual revenues of Rs 20,000 crore this year.”
While increasing milk productivity and improved breeds and feeding practices in India is a challenge for Amul, Sodhi emphasised on the need to encourage the next generation of the rural farmer to remain in animal husbandry business.
“It is possible to earn Rs 40,000 per month with 30-40 cows and buffaloes at project cost of Rs 21 lakh including a loan component of Rs 15 lakh,” Sodhi said.
Unperturbed about the new entrants in the dairy segment from the private sector and MNCs, Sodhi, welcoming the competition, said, “India’s organised sector only constitutes 20 per cent of the Rs 4 lakh crore market size for dairy products in the country and there is space and scope for everyone.”
“Our philosophy for the past 60 years have been to ensure remuneration prices for our 3.5 million members and value for money for the consumer, using the best ingredient at a fair price,” Sodhi said.
Stating that butter making was not a rocket technology and every housewife knows how to make butter, Sodhi said, that 100 grams of Amul butter was still be cheaper than 100 grams of premium soap, which was possible only because of Amul’s philosophy of keeping in mind the farmer and consumer.
“Unlike industry practices, where you buy raw material cheaper and realised better in sales, Amul ensures that raw material is at the best price and selling price remains lower compared to peers,” he said.
“Hence, we cannot spend more than one per cent of our revenue on advertising while other food companies spend 8-15 per cent annually,” Sodhi said, indicating that its advertising expenditure last year was 0.8 per cent.
Sharing the secret of Amul remaining a youthful brand, Sodhi said, “Most of the top members of the management are at their first job working for over four decades and hence have neither changed their campaign nor their agency. Hence, continuity and consistency in communication has kept Amul young with the butter girl.”
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.
