MAM
Cricket Australia loses sponsorship row against ICC
MUMBAI: Cricket Australia (CA) has lost its battle to retain a long-term corporate backer as a team sponsor for the World Cup.
Despite CA’s drawn-out fight to keep Travelex, who has supported the squad on overseas tours since 2001, the ICC decided the company was in conflict with the World Cup partners Visa and Scotia Bank.
The ICC’s Disputes Resolution Committee ruled in favour of the game’s governing body in the sponsorship dispute.
The Committee, made up of the Honourable Michael Beloff QC (chairman), the Honourable Justice Albie Sachs and Oliver Stocken, was appointed to resolve the earlier mentioned issue concerning the forthcoming ICC Cricket World Cup 2007.
The event sponsors Visa and Scotia Bank had been appointed by the ICC’s media rights partner, the Global Cricket Corporation (GCC) which is owned by News International Limited, and had been notified to all teams in June 2006.
Cricket Australia had asked for the matter to be referred to the Disputes Resolution Committee, which carefully considered all the contracts and correspondence. It found that the ICC’s refusal to approve TPL in order to protect the interests of GCC and/or the official event sponsors was correct in all the circumstances.
The Australian cricket team will now use Emirates Airlines as their team sponsor for next month’s World Cup
ICC CEO Malcolm Speed said, “The ICC is extremely pleased that this matter has been resolved ahead of the forthcoming ICC Cricket World Cup.
“The decision of the Disputes Resolution Committee creates an important precedent for future ICC events and, going forward, it will ensure that the position is clear for all stakeholders.”
CA CEO James Sutherland says, “We are disappointed that the ICC committee ruled against us. We believe we put forward a very strong case but, unfortunately, the committee decided otherwise.”
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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.
