Amazon opened its biggest campus in the world in Hyderabad, India. This is the first campus of Amazon that has been built outside of the United States. The campus is a 1.8 million square foot office facility that has been built on 3 million square feet of land. The campus will be employing a total of 15,000 of the company’s Indian employees.
This campus by Amazon made use of 2.5 times more steel by weight as opposed to the steel used for the construction of Eiffel Tower and sits on 9.5 acres of land. John Schoettler is the vice president of Amazon’s Global Real Estate and Facilities. He said, ‘We have eight buildings in Hyderabad with 4 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.’
The Indian market has proven to be a tough competition between Amazon, China’s Alibaba, and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Amazon’s dominance when it comes to the e-commerce industry in Europe and North America is unchallenged. A total of 50% of all e-commerce in the US alone goes via Amazon, whereas its nearest rival, eBay is only able to manage 6%.
However, getting such numbers in India won’t be easy. As per Jake Swearingen and Stephan Kozub of New York Magazine, ‘In late December [2018], the Indian government announced rules that ban e-commerce sites from offering exclusive sales, heavily restrict the ability to offer discounts, and make it illegal for online retail platforms to sell products from companies that they have more than a 25 percent stake in.’
This has some very significant implications for Walmart and Amazon who generally buy large or even controlling stakes in established businesses in the markets that they wish to enter and have been able to utilize their extensive cash reserves for the sake of subsidizing losses in exchange for establishing market share in new regions of industries. In order to compete, India is telling Amazon and Walmart that they will have to establish business relationships with customers from the ground up or pay higher costs for doing business in the country.
With its first overseas campus in India, Amazon is establishing its presence in India. However, the construction started much before the new law was introduced. The company already has more than 62,000 employees in the country, and the new campus will be put to good use by software developers, product managers, and other related administrative offices. Amazon currently has three fulfillment centers in India with two sorting centers and ninety delivery centers. It also has plans of investing $5 billion in India.