Amazon to make big splash in Asia’s answer to Silicon Valley
The austere building is hardly distinguishable in the landscape of glass and concrete buildings making up Asia’s Silicon Valley, as Hyderabad, India, is known. It is one of Amazon’s latest developments, the online retailer’s largest office building in the world.
With plans to cement its place as the center of gravity around which online retail revolves, Amazon has turned to India, the world’s fastest-growing market for internet users. And it has picked Hyderabad, a city of nearly 10 million people in India’s south, as its base of operations there.
But the project faces challenges, including pushback from local businesses and politicians.
Hyderabad has emerged in a few short years as a technology and financial center and a beacon for young talent. The city, which saw the biggest surge in tech office space last year, is already a base in India for other multinational tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple, which spent $25 million for the development of its offices there.
“Hyderabad is a known software tech talent center, and the government has been an enabler for us to have a campus this size,” said Minari Shah, an Amazon spokeswoman. “This is an important confirmation of how India continues to be important to Amazon.”
Over the past decade, the technology behemoth has woven itself into the fabric of Indian life. And now, four years after construction began, the Hyderabad office, Amazon’s first fully owned office outside the United States, joins 40 other offices, 67 shipping centers, 1,400 delivery stations and a workforce of more than 60,000 (plus 155,000 contractors) in the country.
The record size of the building — 1.8 million square feet — and the total campus area are equal to nearly 65 football fields. They have come to symbolize a defining feature of India’s booming tech industry: the inexorable presence of international tech companies.
When Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, visited India in January, he was met with an antitrust case by Indian regulators, who are investigating Amazon and Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart, which is owned largely by Walmart.
India bans foreign direct investment in retail, a shift from policy in the United States and Britain. By law, Amazon and other foreignowned e-commerce firms are required to be neutral marketplaces reliant on independent sellers.
But Praveen Khandelwal, founder and general secretary of the Confederation of All India Traders, which oversees 70 million traders and 40,000 trade associations, argues that the firm has hurt domestic trade, resulting in the closure of thousands of homegrown businesses across the country.
Amazon’s new Hyderabad office, he said, is merely a way to “push for control and dominance over Indian retail trade in a more structured way.” Khandelwal led protests against Amazon’s trade practices this year.
India’s retail regulator is investigating Amazon over allegations that it is using deep discounts and preferred sellers, said Satish Meena, a senior analyst for global technology research firm Forrester.
“There are loopholes they’re exploiting; everyone knows that,” Meena said.
Amazon’s 15-story Hyderabad office opened last year. It’s campus features prayer rooms, a small synthetic cricket pitch, 49 elevators, a helipad and a cafeteria open 24 hours a day. It’s home to 7,000 employees out of an expected workforce of 15,000, largely comprising technology teams focused on using machine learning and software development to innovate services — such as Amazon Pay’s cash load service for digital transactions in a country with 190 million citizens who do not use banks — as well as customer service workers.
Representatives for Amazon declined to comment on the cost of the development but revealed to Bloomberg that it cost “hundreds of millions of dollars” to build.