Amazon, the e-commerce giant which is betting big on Indian market, opened its largest office building globally in Hyderabad. The campus building spread over 9.5 acres comprising of three million square feet built up area can used to seat 15,000 people. Amazon has policy to take the offices on rent and the Hyderabad facility is the first owned office outside United States.
“We have room both for growing [new hires] and consolidating” operations at the campus, Country Head Amit Agarwal said. The company has eight office spaces in Hyderabad and with the new facility it will bring the employees together at one place. 4,000 workers have already been moved to new office while other people will be moved in phased manner.
The Amazon Indian serves the country as well as global operations. The inaugurated facility is the largest base out of company head office in Seattle and it will accommodate software development engineers, machine learning scientists, product managers, finance and many other involved in various function, as per the report by The Hindu. “In Seattle [headquarters] we have approximately 12 million sq ft, half of it owned and the rest leased. Hyderabad is the second location where we have our corporate office outside of the US,” said Amazon vice-president (Global Real Estate and Facilities) John Schoettler.
Amazon plans to expand the domestic operations and exploit India’s growing e-commerce market. The company will also encourage exports from Indian sellers which has already reached 1 billion dollars. The export business is registering “tremendous growth not just in our national business but also export business [with] 50,000 sellers now using the services to export to many countries outside where Amazon customers are based. That business has actually crossed $1 billion and we expect it to grow to $5 billion in next three years,” said Agarwal.
According to a report by Nasscom and PwC, the e-commerce market could grow to 150 billion dollars by 2022, riding on rising middle class and surge in the number of internet users. The e-commerce market was estimated to be around 36 billion dollars last year, dominated by Flipkart and Amazon. “A ‘Make-for-India’ solution approach along with conducive policy environment can potentially make e-commerce a $150 billion market by 2022 with a globally leading compounded annualized growth rate of 35%,” said the report.
India is also behind all BRICS countries in e-commerce readiness index. India at 10% ranks behind countries such as Brazil (20%), China (30%) and Russia. “With demand drivers in place, Indian e-commerce maturity can match that of China’s and Russia’s in 5-6 years,” the report said. Amazon plans to exploit the exponentially growing e-commerce market through increasing manpower and localization of management for swift decision making.