A cluster of stories today underscore the remarkable campaign that Seattle-based Amazon has been waging to dominate the world of online retailing.
Reuters and others are reporting that the company will beef up its European job force by several thousand this year, with more than 2,500 of them in Great Britain. But these warm bodies are only part of the bigger picture, as Amazon ramps up its warehouse-and-delivery network throughout Europe. Throw in more R&D and new facilities to support the company s cloud-computing efforts and you ve got a massive business venture firing on all of its digital cylinders. And all of this builds upon 2015 s job-creation performance when Amazon said it added 10,000 permanent positions in Europe for a total regional workforce over 40,000. (At last count, Amazon has more than 154,000 employees worldwide, most of them male and white by the way, as Tech Times points out here.)
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, said Xavier Garambois, vice president, Amazon EU retail, in the Reuters report.
Meanwhile, Amazon has been stepping up its spending on lobbying efforts big time, according to a report in The Hill. And the news is particularly significant, given the fact that Amazon s spending during the final three months of 2015 – $2,990,000 – dwarfed the previous year s spend for that period by nearly a million dollars. The story says Amazon s primary corporate arm spent around $9 million on lobbying in 2015, a 91 percent increase over the $4.74 million it spent the year before.
Some of those lobbyist bucks went to Amazon s well-publicized efforts to one day use drones to deliver packages from its huge warehouses to its users front doors.
Check out Amazon s lobbying investment on this up-the-staircase chart at Opensecrets.org, and there s no mistaking the sort of political hardball the Seattle giant is playing out there. And it s interesting to go back to this 2013 story in the Washington Post, which happens to be owned by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, to see the long tail of the company s campaign to sway lawmakers in its march toward world domination.
Credit: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma
The post Amazon chugs ahead, here and abroad appeared first on SiliconBeat.
