Amazon India on Wednesday inaugurated the largest company-owned campus, worldwide, in Hyderabad, the only one outside the US. The e-commerce firm will house more than 15,000 employees out of the over 62,000 members of the India team.
The move is part of Amazon’s expansion plans in India, where retail markets are still to a large extent driven by traditional neighbourhood stores.
“Over the last 15 years we have invested significantly in India across 30 office spaces, the AWS (Amazon Web Services) APAC (Asia Pacific) Region in Mumbai, 50 fulfilment centres in 13 states, as well as hundreds of delivery stations and sort centres, creating nearly 200,000 jobs in India," said Amit Agarwal, senior vice-president and country manager, Amazon India.
Amazon’s new campus building, located in Hyderabad’s financial district near Hi-Tech city, is also a step towards countering Walmart Inc., which had acquired India’s largest e-commerce firm Flipkart last year .
The new campus is spread over 9.5 acres, and is its largest tech base outside the Seattle headquarters, which has about 155,000 contract employees.
Telangana is home to one-third of Amazon’s total India employee base across six offices, including the new campus building.
The e-commerce giant has three fulfilment centres in the state, offering more than 3.2 million cubic feet of storage space to sellers, two sort centres with 100,000 sq. ft of processing capacity and 90 delivery stations.
This is one of the largest centres of a multinational company in the country. The India unit of Intel, the US-based chip design company, announced in 2017 that it will invest ₹1,100 crore to expand its research and development centre in Bengaluru, making it the largest such centre outside the US.
Intel’s 620,000 sq. ft facility is part of Intel’s existing 44-acre campus on Sarjapur Ring Road in the city. More recently, Swedish retail giant Ikea had also opened its first Indian outlet in Hyderabad, which is built over an area of 400,000 sq. feet.
