Amazon India said that it will create 5,000 thousand job opportunities in 2017. As part of expansion of its reach in India, the e-commerce giant announced it was doubling its storage capacity in 2017, over the previous year, as continued investment in its fulfilment infrastructure to match its rapidly expanding business in India.
Amazon India said it will add a total of 14 new fulfilment centres (FCs) in 2017, including the recently announced seven specialised ones for large appliances and furniture. These additional new seven fulfilment centres will be set up in Telangana, Haryana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh to support its regular business.
All of these will be fully operational by the end of this quarter to support double digit growth the company. It grew almost 85% in the first quarter of 2017 and continues to rapidly expand to tier 2 and tier 3 cities.
Besides this greenfield addition of new fulfilment centres, it also announced doubling of storage capacity of the FC in Ahmedabad and 6X more space at the urban FC in Delhi to support increased customer and seller demand.
“We are excited to announce our plans for 2017 which will double our storage capacity to support this exponential growth of Amazon.in. We recently announced 7 FCs dedicated to large appliances and furniture and with this capacity doubling, we will now see 41 FCs in India for 2017”, said Akhil Saxena Vice President, India Customer Fulfilment, Amazon India.
“These 41 FCs will bring us closer to our customers and enable thousands of small & medium businesses to fulfil their orders in a cost-efficient manner. With close to 5000 new jobs created by these 14 new FCs, we continue to remain committed to invest in infrastructure and technology in India,” he said.
These new FCs will help sellers of the 3 new states of Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to gain access to and service customers across the country at significantly low operating costs. The company’s FCs will cover a total area of close to 4 million square feet and offer a storage capacity of over 13 million cubic feet. With this wide network of FCs, Amazon will be able to able to fulfil Prime orders even faster than before.
When using fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), sellers across India send their products to Amazon’s FCs and once an order is placed, Amazon picks, packs and ships the order to the customer, provides customer service and manages returns on behalf of the sellers.
Sellers save money by replacing their upfront capital expense with low variable cost and pay only for the storage space they use and the orders that Amazon fulfils. Sellers always have the flexibility to choose the number of products they want to have fulfilled by Amazon and scale according to their business requirements. Currently, over 2 million products are available for immediate shipping through the network of Amazon’s FCs in India.
