Amazon to create more than 1,000 jobs in UK
Uncertainty surrounding Brexit and the increasingly real prospect of the UK crashing out of the EU without a trade deal seemingly has not deterred Amazon, who have just announced plans to create more than 1,000 highly skilled tech jobs across three UK cities.
The world’s second largest public company will be creating at least 600 roles at a new site in Manchester. Development centres in Cambridge and Edinburgh will also be adding 180 and 250 jobs respectively.
Amazon UK country manager Doug Gurr said the company is bringing “Silicon Valley jobs” to Britain, prompting International Trade Secretary Liam Fox to respond that the news is an “enormous vote of confidence in the UK”.
The new Manchester site in the iconic Hanover Building in the city’s Northern Quarter will span 90,000 square feet and will focus on software, machine learning, R&D and the company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services.
Amazon’s Cambridge development centre has teams working on hardware devices such as Kindle and Echo, the Alexa voice assistant and the company’s new drone delivery service, Prime Air.
The Edinburgh site at the Waverley Gate building was Amazon’s first R&D centre outside North America.
Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Wright, said: “It is great global tech giant Amazon has chosen Manchester, a vital part of the Northern Powerhouse, to open their new office and are creating hundreds of high-skilled jobs up and down the country. Our booming digital sector is one of the fastest-growing industries in the UK and this is a vote of confidence in our world-leading skills in tech innovation.”
Amazon employs over 575,000 staff worldwide. By the end of this year, they are forecast to have around 27,500 UK-based employees, including 6,500 in their corporate, AWS and R&D divisions and over 20,000 at their 17 warehouses and 40 delivery stations. In March 2018 they surpassed Alphabet to become the world’s second largest public company (behind Apple) and in September 2018 become the second publicly traded US company to be valued at more than $1 trillion.
23 October 2018.
Sources:
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=251199&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2372420
https://www.recruiter.co.uk/news/2018/10/amazon-looks-create-1000-new-hi-tech-jobs-uk
https://bdaily.co.uk/articles/2018/10/19/amazon-to-create-more-than-1000-silicon-valley-jobs-in-uk
