Brands
Nike India onboards Siddhant Narayan as head of marketing
Mumbai: Sportswear major Nike India has onboarded Siddhant Narayan as its marketing head. Prior to this, Narayan was chief marketing officer at Chinese smartphone brand OnePlus – a position he quit in May 2021.
Sharing the news on his LinkedIn, Narayan wrote: “Excited and humbled with this wonderful opportunity to inspire every athlete through the power of sport.”
This would be Narayan’s second stint with the sportswear brand, having previously worked at the organisation for seven years between May 2008 and October 2015, in various roles such as sports marketing specialist (May 2008 – Dec 2010), product marketing manager (Jan 2011 – Feb 2012), and brand manager (Mar 2012 – Oct 2015) respectively.
During the period, Narayan is credited with co-creating the impactful 360 brand campaign ‘Bleed Blue’ which went on to become a popular campaign at the Cricket World Cup in 2015, among others.
An alumnus of MIT School of Business, Pune, Narayan has also worked with brands such as Daniel Wellington and Reliance Jio in positions of leadership in the past.
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.
