In South India, Amazon Builds Its Largest Office Yet

Over the last 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 work force 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 the 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 foreign-owned 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.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/business/amazon-hyderabad-india.html