Amazon opens its world's largest campus in Hyderabad

Hyderabad: US-based e-commerce giant Amazon on Wednesday inaugurated its new campus here - its 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 3 million sq ft 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 in Hyderabad with 4 million sq ft 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.

Telangana Home Minister Mohd. Mahmood Ali inaugurated the campus as Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, who was scheduled to inaugurate it, was busy with Collectors' Conference.

The new premises 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. "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 said. Amazon had laid the foundation stone for the campus building on March 30, 2016.

An average of 2,000 workers were 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 focused 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.

Amazon has three fulfilment centres in Telangana offering more than 3.2 million cubic feet of storage space to sellers, two sorting centres with one lakh sq ft of processing capacity and 90 delivery stations, a statement said.

Emphasising the company's commitment to the Indian market, Agarwal said it has already announced $5 billion investments in India, and another $500 million in food and retail. "We continue to invest across all over businesses," he added. He said 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 3 per cent of total retail. When you are that small, there is so much room to grow," he said.

Agarwal said the company had launched its Global Selling programme in India a few years ago that allows small and medium businesses in the country to sell to customers in other countries.