It’s no coincidence that Amazon’s biggest building is in India.
In the southern city of Hyderabad, known as Asia’s Silicon Valley,
the tech giant’s campus covers 9.5 acres and holds 1.8 million square feet of office space.
That’s 50 times the area of the Taj Mahal’s mausoleum.
One of the first things you notice when you walk in are some country-specific themes.
And plenty of quotes to motivate the 15,000 employees who work here, many of whom are engineers.
The building is jam-packed with workspaces for them. Even its headquarters in Seattle can’t hold that number of people.
The company didn’t spare any expense - the cafeteria is open 24/7, there’s a cricket area, and even a landing pad for helicopters.
Amazon’s choice of India for its mega-building is in line with Jeff Bezos’ obsession with long-term thinking.
The e-commerce giant already dominates the online retail market in much of the West.
But global dominance depends on cracking the Indian market with its 1.3 billion potential customers.
Thank you.
It’s working hard to make inroads no matter the method - sometimes old technology is still the best option to make deliveries.
But India has been a tough nut to crack.
In 2019, the government made it harder for multinational corporations to do business there.
Amazon was banned from selling products from companies where it holds an equity stake.
Items from the department store Shoppers Stop had to be removed since Amazon owns part of that chain.
Analysts believe the new regulation was politically motivated - esigned to protect small businesses and keep shopowners happy enough
to re-elect prime minister Narendra Modi.
Eventually, Shoppers Stop relisted items through a subsidiary.
But this just goes to show that it hasn’t been easy to operate in India, so you have to come up with ways to jump over the barriers.
For Amazon, that has meant constructing a giant building to show the benefits you can bring to the local economy through the creation of new jobs.
2,000 people worked on-site every day for over three years, according to the company.
They used more than twice as much steel as the Eiffel Tower to build this beast.
The only thing bigger is India’s growing appetite for the web.
In 2016, about a quarter of the Indian population used the Internet.
This year – over half are expected to be connected.
The sharp increase is also attributed to the 4G rollout a couple of years ago.
And if you add a rising middle class into this mix, this means more spending online.
In 2010, the virtual retail market brought in less than a billion bucks.
In 2024, it’s expected to top $100 billion.
And there’s a lot of room to grow. E-commerce only represents about 4 percent of India’s total retail consumption.
The pandemic appears to have further accelerated the trend toward online shopping.
During Amazon’s deal event last year, Prime Day, it said twice as many customers in India signed up for a prime membership compared to the year before.
Despite the growth, Amazon still faces some stiff competition -
especially from Walmart, which acquired the country’s largest online retailer, Flipkart, a few years ago.
So, how do you go about beating your rival?
Bezos has always believed that it’s not about focusing on the competition but rather, the customer.
This has meant appealing to the hundreds of millions of people who live in remote and rural areas.
They often have to travel far to access a store or don’t have many options once there, so doorstep deliveries - by bike or by boat - would be life-changing.
To help entice these customers to sign up, the Amazon app features descriptions in Hindi, works with cheap smartphones,
and payments in cash at delivery is allowed.
Amazon is also trying to make its mark in the food and grocery industry because that comprises the largest part of India’s retail market.
It launched a service similar to UberEats called Amazon Food last year - delivering prepared meals in select parts of Bangalore, another tech hub.
It’s keen to grow Amazon Fresh - a grocery delivery service.
And to further push into the food market, the tech giant partnered with a company operating major supermarket chains so their goods are sold on the site.
Amazon hopes its foray into India is much more successful than what happened in China, where it failed to gain any traction
despite trying for more than a decade.
It threw in the towel in 2019, when shoppers could no longer buy from local sellers on Amazon.cn.
The site is now limited to items available from the global store, like Kindles.
Amazon couldn’t compete against rivals Alibaba and JD.com that offered fast and often free shipping without any minimum order requirements.
Amazon barely talks about its Chinese business but it’s certainly not shying away from discussing India.
This massive building symbolizes its commitment to that nation - a nation where it's invested $6.5 billion since 2014.
The pandemic has also shaped a new path for Amazon India as more people take up virtual learning.
It recently launched an online academy to train students hoping to get into the nation’s top engineering schools.
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