Amazon has 1,300 Vacancies in India, highest in Asia-Pacific

In Asia-Pacific, Amazon has the highest number of job openings in India, according to data on its website. There are almost three times as many openings here compared to that in China. Even outside Asia-Pacific and excluding home ground the US, only Germany appears to have about as many openings as India.

Across different businesses and various roles, including technology, Amazon has almost 1,300 openings in India. China has 467 job openings and Japan 381. Australia and Singapore follow with 250 and 174, respectively.

The company in India is said to be expanding significantly beyond its e-commerce and cloud business (AWS) into areas such as payments, content (Prime video), voice-assistant (Alexa), food retail and customer support. At the end of 2018, it directly employed over 60,000 people in India. That's about 10% of its global strength of 6.1 lakh employees. Most of the fresh hiring will be in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai.

Industry sources said Amazon could use this employment generation to push its case in the ongoing policy discussion with the Centre. The recently announced clarifications by the government on FDI in e-commerce could force the Seattle-based e-tailing giant to significantly change its business model in India. The new rules, which seek to make e-commerce players into pure technology platforms, with little control over sellers on the platform, come into effect next month.

A company spokeswoman said Amazon sees India as a strong talent location. Amazon teams in India, she said, work on complex business challenges to innovate and create effective solutions that enable various Amazon businesses - both in India as well as globally, including Amazon websites across the world - and also support payments, transportation, and digital products & services like the Kindle family of tablets, e-readers and the store.

"With our constant growth, we are always looking for some exceptional talent across levels in areas of software development, product & marketing, machine learning, quality assurance, web development, product management, supply chain, content development, operations, studio & photography and for other positions in the India consumer business. We have created thousands of skilled and semi-skilled jobs in India over the past decade," she said.

Souq.com opens Dubai centre that will Create 600 Jobs

Souq.com, the e-commerce platform Amazon bought for $580 million (Dh2.13 billion) last year, has opened a centre in Dubai that will create 600 jobs as the company continues to expand its footprint and sales in the Middle East.

The 23,000 square metre facility is the company’s third UAE fulfilment centre, which enables sellers to have a Souq store and ship their products to different customers, the company said in a statement.

“The increased fulfilment capacity also benefits our sellers, who comprise of thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses, by enabling them to scale up their businesses on our marketplace,” said Ronaldo Mouchawar, chief executive of Souq.

Souq is benefiting from the rise in online shopping in the UAE and the region as a whole. The Emirates is the fourth most prepared developing economy for e-commerce, according to a new index from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad).

The e-commerce sector in the Middle East is growing at the fastest pace globally with online sales expected to double to $48.8bn by 2021, said a report by Fitch Solutions, a unit of Fitch Group. The UAE is set to be one of the world leaders, with e-commerce spending in the country increasing 170 per cent to $27.1bn in 2022, from $9.7bn in 2017.

“The new Dubai fulfilment centre, along with the existing FCs, will enable Souq to handle the current and future demand in the UAE, where a growing number of customers choose Souq for their purchases,” said the company. “The new facility will also help Souq meet is objective of growing selection and improving convenience for its customers.”

Amazon is adding 2,000 Jobs in France

US online shopping giant Amazon said Thursday it plans to create 2,000 permanent full-time jobs in France this year as consumers are making more and more of their purchases via the internet. 

"The jobs are at all levels of skills even if the overwhelming majority of the positions are for fulfilling orders," Amazon's director in France Frederic Duval told.

The new jobs will be across Amazon's distribution centres in France, as well as its offices in the Paris region, and take overall staff to 7,500.

Amazon said it has invested more than two billion euros ($2.5 billion) in France since 2010 and created more than 1,500 jobs in France last year.

However, Amazon, along with other US tech companies, has also been at loggerheads with French authorities over taxes as they structure sales to pass through other European countries where tax rates are lower.

Amazon announced earlier this month it had reached an agreement with French tax authorities under which it will now register French sales in France.

Amazon is Hiring more than 1,000 People in India.

Amazon is looking to hire more than 1,000 people, mostly software professionals, in India.

The hires will cater largely to research and development for the company's different divisions including Amazon.com, Amazon.in, the devices business, and the cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company told that its hiring was limited only by the availability of talent in the required technologies and it was looking to hire as many as possible.

Amazon's website listed 1,245 open positions in India on its careers page. It has around 50,000 people on its rolls in the country. India is currently the second largest workforce centre for Amazon after the US. Globally, it has 3,41,000 employees.

"The numbers are mind boggling. We are looking at a fully functional tech organisation in India and are hiring varied skills across several job families.India is a big focus area for talent globally," Dale Vaz, director of software development at Amazon India, told.

It is looking for talent in technology spheres like research scientists, data analytics, natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence machine learning (AIML) and Android developers.

AWS, Amazon's most profitable business unit, is looking to hire 195 people in India. Among the open positions, 557 are in Bengaluru, 403 in Hyderabad and 149 in Chennai. "We process a lot of data and are always looking for data processing and profiling engineers," Vaz said.

The Bengaluru centre is the largest for Amazon in India. The Chennai centre focuses on devices like Kindle and Fire. The recruitment number for Bengaluru alone is higher than for any other centre outside of the US.

Amazon Create 1500 Jobs at Salt Lake City

Amazon announced it will be creating 1,500 full-time jobs at its Salt Lake City fulfilment centre on Wednesday.

"We are excited to continue growing our team with the first fulfilment centre in Utah," said Akash Chauhan, Amazon's Vice President of North American operations.

The hourly associates will receive a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package, according to a press release from the company.

"We consider this a perfect pairing, as Amazon and Salt Lake City are both known for our customer service and ease of doing business. We are very excited for the 1,500 new full-time jobs Amazon will create in our community, and look forward to a long future of working together," said Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski.

The company's expansion in the beehive state comes after a patent revealed that Amazon wants to create beehive drone delivery centres.

Amazon to hire 5,000 new Tech Staff in UK

Amazon said it was looking for a range of staff including software developers and warehouse staff. There will be jobs at Amazon's head office in London, as well as in the Edinburgh customer service centre and in three new warehouses. The recruitment will take Amazon's workforce in the UK to more than 24,000.

Doug Gurr, the head of Amazon's UK business, said: "We are creating thousands of new UK jobs including hundreds of apprenticeship opportunities as we continue to innovate for our customers and provide them with even faster delivery, more selection and better value."

The company is opening three new warehouses, or what it calls "fulfilment centres", in Tilbury, Doncaster and Daventry. “We are hiring for all types of roles from flight-test engineers, software engineers and corporate managers in our development centres and head office, to operations managers, supervisors, engineers, service technicians, HR roles and order fulfilment roles in our fulfilment centres [packing warehouses],” said Doug Gurr, Amazon’s UK country manager.The extra warehouse space will be used to cope with existing growth and to speed up deliveries.

It will also handle deliveries for third-party retailers, who sell through Amazon's website and use Amazon for deliveries.

Growth in those third-party sellers has been particularly rapid. The expansion reflects the importance of the UK market, which is Amazon's second biggest outside the US, behind Germany.

Services which are developed in the US are usually launched in the UK first, such as Amazon Fresh, the grocery service which was launched in parts of the UK last summer.

'Illegal hours'

As well as expanding in groceries, Amazon is also pushing into fashion, says Natalie Berg, retail analyst at Planet Retail.

Clothes sales are already one of its fastest growing areas and it has been reported that Amazon is close to launching its own-brand fashion label.

That rumour has been fuelled by Amazon's creation of a fashion photography studio in London's Shoreditch. "If you are a grocer or fashion retailer, Amazon is keeping you up at night," said Ms Berg.

Last year Amazon had to defend its employment practices after a BBC reporter, working undercover at an agency which was contracted by Amazon to deliver parcels, spoke to drivers who claimed they worked illegally long hours and were expected to deliver up to 200 parcels a day. Amazon said it was committed to ensuring drivers drive safely and legally, and are "fairly compensated".

Amazon create 100,000 new jobs in US

US-based e-commerce and cloud computing company Amazon has plans to create more than 100,000 new jobs in the US over the next 18 months.

The e-commerce giant, which employs 180,000 full-time US workers, said in a statement on Thursday it would create an additional 100,000 full-time, full-benefit jobs in the country by mid-2018, The Financial Times reported.

Amid surging retail sales, Amazon grew its global headcount by 38 percent in the third quarter of last year, compared with a year prior.

The company added 80,000 new employees, both full and part time, in the 12 months to October 2016, and has more than 300,000 employees.

Amazon’s announcement highlights a new reality for companies as Mr Trump prepares to take office: His public praising or shaming of corporations for their business decisions is pressuring them to stay in his good graces and to adjust their public-relations strategies.

During the presidential campaign, Mr Trump made job creation a central message and blasted companies, including technology giants, for purportedly sending jobs overseas. Since his election, companies across a range of industries have scurried to announce plans to retain or add U.S. jobs.

Amazon was a frequent target of criticism from the president-elect during the campaign.

However, its chief Jeff Bezos appeared to smooth things over by participating in a meeting between tech leaders and Trump last month.