Hyderabad | Amazon.com Inc on Wednesday opened its largest campus building in the ‘IT City’ Hyderabad in Telangana, spread over 9.5 acres.
The new campus is Amazon’s first owned office building outside the U.S. and is the single largest building globally. The office space of 1.8 million sq ft can seat 15,000 people.
“We have room both for growing [new hires] and consolidating” operations at the campus, Country Head Amit Agarwal said.
Amazon and Walmart have been furiously competing for the largely untapped market, the latter of which spent $16 billion last year to buy India’s biggest startup, retailer Flipkart Online Services Pvt.
Amazon currently has eight office spaces in Hyderabad. “It is natural for us to bring people together in one place. This large building also gives us enough space to grow… we will do that in phases. Already 4,000 employees have moved in [to the new campus] from other locations [in Hyderabad]”, he said.
“This facility will build services globally,” Agarwal added, citing examples like AWS, Kindle, Alexa, Amazon.in and Amazon Home Services, which is “innovating on things like doorstep pick-up and electronics repair.”
Asked on the economic slowdown and the likely impact on the business plans of Amazon, he said, “We haven’t seen any slowdown yet. One reason is e-commerce is very small portion of retail consumption in India, probably less than 3%. When it is that small, there is so much room to grow.”
About investments made in India, he said: “We publicly announced $5 billion of investment so far and another $500 million in food retail. Outside of that we continue to invest in across our businesses.”
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