Brands
Flipkart partners Viacom18 for licensing global brands
MUMBAI: In a first of its kind partnership, e-commerce company Flipkart has inked a deal with Viacom18 for licensing three major international brands in India.
In a bid to offer Indian consumers authentic and branded merchandise, the Flipkart – Viacom18 collaboration will see the licensing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spongebob Squarepants and Peanuts for sellers in India.
According to Flipkart, this partnership provides a superior analytics system and tight control to help international brand kick-start their operations in India. Global brands are constantly looking to partner with the most competent manufacturers across categories, and Flipkart aims to become the licensing platform that connects these brands to the most deserving sellers in India.
Additionally, the company has expertise across more than 70 product verticals, which will allow it to offer these brands in a more innovative approach towards merchandising and sales.
With this, sellers will have the opportunity to create a better experience for buyers, by assuring them quality of authentic products and differentiating themselves from the clutter on the marketplace.
Flipkart vice president and head – seller ecosystem Manish Maheshwari said, “Through this online licensing concept, we want to simply this process by connecting brands with the top performing sellers on our platform, giving the brands the power to keep a track on the product sales as well as the quality.”
“It gives us great pride to introduce a concept like this for the first time in India where a global player can connect with Flipkart and have the product licensed across any number of sellers they want,” he added.
Flipkart is also looking to expand and extend its existing ecosystem by adding licensors on one side and high-quality sellers that are eligible to be licensees on the other side.
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.
