Brands
Nippon Paint India sharpens India-first push under new leadership
CHENNAI: Nippon Paint India has drawn a bold line under its leadership transition, rolling out a tightly focused, India-first growth playbook under managing director Sharad Malhotra. Unveiled in Chennai on January 09, 2026, the strategy is the company’s clearest articulation yet of how it plans to scale in one of its most contested markets.
The roadmap centres on three levers: a sharper India-centric operating model, faster pan-India expansion and selective inorganic growth to bulk up its local portfolio. With seven manufacturing plants already in place and a strong ‘Make in India’ backbone, the company is doubling down on local relevance while tapping Japanese technology and process discipline.
The immediate thrust is expansion beyond its southern stronghold. Nippon Paint India plans to deepen penetration across high-growth urban and semi-urban centres, refine market segmentation and widen its dealer and distribution footprint, even as it defends share in core regions.
Malhotra called India a long-term priority, signalling a shift from opportunistic growth to deliberate scale. As the first Indian managing director of Nippon Paint India, his brief is to build an India-specific model that meets global standards but plays to local realities.
The push is mirrored in the decorative business, where president Mark Titus sees headroom driven by premiumisation, brand building and stronger channel and influencer partnerships. The emphasis: thoughtful scale, global best practice and brands that travel across regions.
Operationally, the company will bring all its paints and coatings businesses under a unified operating structure, designed to unlock manufacturing flexibility, operational leverage and a single, cohesive pan-India engine.
Backed by six decades of Asia-Pacific leadership and a balance across decorative, industrial, automotive, OEM, refinish and wood coatings, Nippon Paint is betting on technology-led growth, disciplined execution and selective M&A. The message is clear: India is no longer a market to test—it is a market to win.
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.
