Hyderabad: US-based e-commerce giant Amazon inaugurated Wednesday its new campus here – the company’s largest facility globally – that will house 15,000 of its employees in India.
The campus building contains over 2.5 times more steel than the Eiffel Tower, measured by weight, and is spread over 9.5 acres of land.
With 15,000 work points across 1.8 million sq ft in office space, built on three million square feet of construction area – this is Amazon’s single largest building in the world in terms of total area, said Amazon vice-president of Global Real Estate and Facilities, John Schoettler.
“We have eight buildings here with four million square feet of office space. We are going to be migrating some of the employees out of some of those facilities (to the new campus). So far as of today, we moved around 4,500 to the (new campus). The building can hold – at any given point of time – 15,000 people,” he told reporters here.
This is the only Amazon-owned campus outside the US. The move strengthens Amazon’s focus on talent in India, where the company has over 62,000 full-time employees.
“It (Hyderabad campus) is also the largest technology base outside Seattle (Amazon’s headquarters). The employees (in Hyderabad) include software development engineers, machine learning scientists, product managers, finance and many other functions,” Amazon India Senior VP and Country Manager Amit Agarwal told reporters here.
Amazon had laid the foundation stone for the campus building, March 30, 2016. An average of 2,000 workers was on the site every day for 39 months to construct the building, spending 18 million man-hours.
The company, which is locked in an intense battle for market leadership in India with Walmart-owned Flipkart, has also focussed on sustainability while designing the new facility.
The campus has more than 300 trees dotting its grounds with three specimen trees aged over 200 years and has an 850,000-litre water recycling plant, Schoettler said.
Emphasising the company’s commitment to the Indian market, Amit Agarwal said it has already announced USD five billion investments in India, and another USD 500 million in food and retail. “We continue to invest across all over businesses,” Agarwal informed.
Agarwal asserted that the company has not seen a slowdown in its business in India.
“As far as our services go, we don’t see any slowdown. There could be multiple reasons. I think one thing to keep in mind is that e-commerce is very, very small…it is probably just three per cent (of total retail). When you are that small, there is so much room to grow,” Amit Agarwal informed.
PTI