Amazon today indicated it will significantly expand its logistics activities in Europe this year by taking on thousands of additional staff in its fulfillment centres as well as in other business areas.
At present the e-commerce giant is rapidly expanding its delivery capabilities in the UK, planning a similar rollout in Germany, acquiring French B2C parcels firm Colis Privé, and investing in new logistics centres in several European markets.
Amazon said in 2016 it is investing to expand its European Fulfilment Network, increase EU-based research and development, and build new infrastructure to support its growing cloud-computing business, among other initiatives.
Last year the company created 10,000 new jobs across Europe where it now has more than 40,000 employees, and plans to create several thousand more new jobs in Europe this year. The 2015 figure was 50% higher than in 2014. There will be about 2,500 additional staff in the UK alone and about 1,000 more in Poland, according to diverse media reports.
“We are seeing stronger demand than ever from our customers all across Europe, and we see lots more opportunity across Amazon’s businesses to invent and invest for the future. We created over 10,000 new jobs in 2015 and plan to create several thousand more in 2016 at all education, experience and skill levels, from speech and linguistic scientists to digital media experts to fulfilment centre and customer service associates,” said Xavier Garambois, Vice President, Amazon EU Retail.
Roy Perticucci, Vice President, Amazon EU Operations, added: “We’re planning to add thousands of new jobs in all areas across our European Fulfilment Network in 2016 as we ramp up to meet increased demand from customers and invent in new areas.”
Amazon said it has invested over €15 billion since 2010 on infrastructure and operations in Europe. The company operates a pan-EU business with over 80 corporate offices, fulfilment centres, seller and customer service centres, R&D centres, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenter regions. The company recently announced new investments in London for a new UK head office and a new datacenter region for AWS customers. The UK datacenter region is in addition to the existing AWS datacenter regions in Frankfurt and in Dublin.
Amazon is hiring more computer scientists and software development engineers (SDEs) across its European network of 12 research and development centres. Centres in Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the UK are inventing in areas across the company, including the Amazon retail website and mobile apps, digital media, devices and device software such as voice recognition technology, Prime Air, and cloud services.
