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Titan announces leadership reshuffle in jewellery and watches
BENGALURU: Titan Co Ltd has announced key appointments within its senior management, effective later this year and early next. These changes follow previous intimations regarding the succession of C.K. Venkataraman as managing director and the resignation of Suparna Mitra, CEO of the watches division.
Arun Narayan, currently overseeing the Tanishq India business for retail, marketing, and merchandising, is set to become the chief executive officer of the jewellery division from 1 January 2026. He will succeed Ajoy Chawla, who is slated to take over as managing director on the same date.
A post-graduate from IIM Calcutta and a veteran of the Tata Administrative Services cadre, Narayan brings nearly three decades of experience in retail, marketing, and sales leadership roles within the Tata group and Titan. Since April 2020, he has been leading the Tanishq India business and previously held key positions as regional business head (west, all categories), Helios business head, and national sales & retail head for Titan watches.
Meanwhile, Kuruvilla Markose, currently the CEO of Titan’s international business division, will take over as the chief executive officer of the watches division from 13 August 2025. He steps into the role vacated by Suparna Mitra. Markose, who holds degrees in agriculture and an MBA from IIFT, New Delhi, also joined the Tata Administrative Services in 1995. His three decades of experience span diverse sectors including FMCG, telecom, BPO, consulting, digital, and retail across the Tata group. He joined Titan in 2015 as chief digital officer and has been leading the company’s international expansion in watches, jewellery, and eyecare as CEO of the international business division.
These appointments are part of a broader leadership transition within the company’s senior management.
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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.
