For the 15 years that Amazon has been present in Romania, the international retail giant has invested more than €100M in its local business operations and is now about to open three new local offices and hire over 500 employees between 2021 and 2023. The three new offices will be located in the western city Timisoara and the northeastern city Iasi and their operations will be focused respectively on Amazon devices and Ring home security devices, and on Retail Business Support, which takes care of optimizing Amazon’s selection and discoverability for customers.
The first office is planned to open by the second quarter of 2021 in Timisoara, the two other offices, which will be located in Iasi are expected to open by the end of 2021 and in 2023. The vision is that when the last office opens in Iasi, Amazon will be able to move its entire local workforce of 3000 employees there and consolidate its operations in the new Palas Campus. The Palas Campus teams will be in charge of Compliance Ops, Creative Product Operations, and Customer Behavior Analytics, as well as AWS Global IT and Content Creation Tools. Currently, the only office of Amazon and its on-demand cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services is located in Bucharest and hosts an Engineering Center, and Centers for Technology Development, Speech and Language Solutions for Alexa and Alexa Product Testing.
What makes SEE an attractive innovation destination?
As the main goal of international IT companies currently is to figure out how to unleash faster growth and boost product innovations, the value of outsourcing IT talent to SEE can no longer be attributed to simply obtaining a better cost advantage and hiring cheaper labor. Instead, the main reasons for the emergence of IT outsourcing hubs in the region are the available tech talent, which has already proven its value on the innovation market, the benefits which derive from building partnerships with technology startups in the region, and the attractive government tax incentives that encourage foreign investment and allow for the cost-effective establishment of regional offices and R&D centers. When looking at Romania in particular, besides Amazon, the country is home to the regional offices of some of the biggest international software and telecom giants such as Microsoft, Huawei, Oracle, and HP.
