ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN IN SAN JOSE/SILICON VALLEY CLEARLY KNOWS
NO TECH FIRM HIRES AMERICANS! ONLY CHINESE/INDIANS.
IN FACT, NO BAY AREA BANK HIRES ANYONE WHO IS AMERICAN. YEP,
ONLY CHINESE AND INDIANS.
“Indian officials want to swap their cheap labor to U.S.
investors in exchange for a larger flow of remittances, contracts, expertise,
technology, and energy back into India. The two sides have gradually created a
U.S-India Outsourcing Economy, which is worth roughly $78 billion to India each
year.”
H-1B: San Jose tech firm discriminated
against non-Indians,
favored visa holders,
lawsuit claims
Caucasian plaintiff seeks class-action status
By ETHAN BARON | ebaron@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News
Group
PUBLISHED: September 9, 2019
A San Jose subsidiary of an Indian digital-services company
favored hiring Indian and South Asian workers for its U.S. jobs, and used the
H-1B and another visa to accomplish its discrimination, a new lawsuit seeking
class-action status claims.
Happiest Minds, which has its U.S. headquarters in San Jose,
used visas and discriminatory hiring and firing practices to fill its ranks
with South Asian workers, most of them Indian, the suit alleged. At least 90
percent of the firm’s U.S. workforce is South Asian, while the rate is about 12
percent across this country’s information-technology industry, the suit
claimed.
Happiest Minds, which according to the suit employs about 200
workers in the U.S., did not respond to a request for comment on the claims in
the suit.
The suit was filed by San Jose sales professional Tami
Sulzberg, who said in a court filing that she started at Happiest Minds in
January 2018 as a director of business development and was fired about four
months later. Sulzberg claims she was replaced by an Indian man who was on an
L-1 visa. The L-1 is a non-immigrant work permit for managers or executives
transferred into the U.S. from a company’s affiliate office in a foreign
country.
The suit also pointed to purported use by Happiest Minds of
the controversial H-1B visa, intended for jobs requiring specialized skills.
The H-1B, heavily relied upon by Silicon Valley technology firms, which push
for an expansion of the annual 85,000 cap on new visas, has become a target for
the administration of President Donald Trump. The administration has
dramatically boosted denial rates for the visa after reports of abuses by
outsourcing companies. Critics of the visa charge that outsourcers and tech
companies use it to supplant U.S. workers and drive down wages.
Sulzberg’s suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San
Jose, alleged that Happiest Minds received 188 new H-1B visas or H-1B visa
amendments between 2013 and 2018, plus 12 new L-1 visas in 2018 alone.
“To fulfill its employment preference for South Asians and
Indians, Happiest Minds seeks to maximize the number of visas it receives each
year from the federal government,” the suit alleged. “All, or substantially
all, of the individuals for whom Happiest Minds secures visas are South Asian
and Indian.”
Preference in hiring is given to South Asian and Indian
workers who can be brought in using a visa, the suit claimed.
“Similarly, non-South Asian and non-Indian individuals are
often displaced from their current positions in favor of South Asian and Indian
visa-ready individuals,” the suit alleged.
Sulzberg claimed in the suit that she had been the only
non-Indian among the approximately 25 salsepeople in Happiest Minds’ U.S.
offices. Her purported troubles started during a sales meeting about six weeks
after she started at the firm, the suit claimed.
“Ms. Sulzberg was the only female employee at the meeting and
the only individual who was non-South Asian and non-Indian,” the suit alleged.
“Ms. Sulzberg was excluded by her South Asian colleagues who spoke in Hindi,
thereby precluding her from participating in certain conversations, and was
specifically asked not to attend the first portion
of the meeting involving the whole group.”
During her presentation at the meeting, which was supposed to
last an hour, the firm’s South Asian CEO rudely interrupted her, saying he
didn’t want to look at her PowerPoint and telling her, ‘Move on, move on,’
before cutting her off after 10 minutes, the suit claimed. The CEO also asked
her to book him a hotel room for an upcoming meeting “despite the fact that Ms.
Sulzberg’s sales role did not involve such administrative or secretarial
responsibilities,” the suit alleged.
The following month, after receiving approval from a senior
vice-president to attend a conference in Las Vegas to pursue sales, Sulzberg
was told by that executive that the CEO didn’t want her to go, the suit
claimed. However, an Indian employee was permitted to attend, the suit alleged.
From shortly after her hiring until she was fired, Sulzberg
was evaluated on the basis of how many meetings she obtained, an evaluation
standard used at the company for junior salespeople lacking her experience, the
suit claimed.
Happiest Minds did hire someone to generate meetings for her,
but he went on paternity leave soon after he came on, and didn’t start setting
meetings for her until a few weeks before she was terminated, the suit alleged.
Despite her lack of help, Sulzberg on her own hit her meetings target, the suit
claimed. But less than two months after meeting the requirement, Sulzberg was
told her meetings numbers were “below par” and she was ordered to generate two
to three meetings per week, the suit alleged. The day after that, she was
fired, with the CEO telling her it was for “not having enough meetings,” the
suit claimed.
“This excuse was pretextual, as Ms. Sulzberg had many
meetings with large companies during her short tenure with the company,” the
suit alleged, adding that her prohibition from attending the conference kept
her from generating additional meetings.
Four other non-South Asian salespeople were terminated, with
one of them replaced by a South Asian man on a visa, the suit claimed. While
Happiest Minds fired Sulzberg a few months after hiring her, it retained a
South Asian salesman who “did not sell any new business for the company during
his first year of employment with Happiest Minds and continues not to meet his
sales goals,” the suit claimed. The man had been given a sales portfolio worth
more than $400,000, allowing him to generate ongoing revenue from current
clients, but “Ms. Sulzberg was not afforded the same benefit,” the suit
alleged.
The suit seeks a judge’s approval as a class action, to bring
in anyone not of South Asian or Indian origin who applied for jobs at Happiest
Minds in the U.S. and weren’t hired, or whom the company involuntarily
terminated. It also seeks an order forcing the company to adopt a
non-discriminatory method for hiring, firing and other employment-related
decisions, plus unspecified damages.
India Has More than 630,000 Illegals in the
United States
NEIL MUNRO
Two Indians have been sent to jail for just three years after
smuggling hundreds of Indians into the United States.
Hema Patel, 51, worked with Mexican coyotes and charged
$28,000 to $60,000 to bring individuals across the Canadian and Mexican
borders. When the illegals were caught, she also used her Texas bail-bonds
business to spring her clients from detention, according to an ICE press
release.
Patel and her business partner, Chandresh Kumar Patel, were
both sent to jail for three years. Patel also had to give up her Texas house,
two hotels, $7.2 million in bail bonds, $400,000 in cash and 11 gold bars, the
ICE statement said.
The case spotlights the growing number of Indian workers and
family members who are working illegally in the United States or are trying to
smuggle themselves into the United States.
The growing numbers of illegal-immigrant Indians hope to hide
among the growing number of legal Indian immigrants. For example, the illegals
can take jobs in retail, service, and restaurants serving the legal Indian
population.
Roughly 4 million Indians live in the United States. Roughly
half are contract workers or are the spouses and children of the contract
workers. At least one-sixth — or roughly 630,000 — are illegals.
A June 2019 report by the Pew Research Center said India is
now the leading source of legal migrants into the United States:
More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year.
In 2017, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was
India, with 126,000 people, followed by Mexico (124,000), China (121,000) and
Cuba (41,000).
In 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that Indians are
also the fast-growing group ofillegal migrants. The population of Indian
illegals spiked from 350,000 in 2009 to 500,000 in 2014. Their 130 percent
growth far outpaced other countries — but it has since been supplanted since
2017 by the massive wave of migrants from Central America.
“The [illegal immigrant] population from India increased by
265,000, or 72 percent, from 2010 to 2017,” said a report by the Center for
Migration Studies. The estimate puts the Indian illegal population at 630,000
people in 2017, including roughly 250,000 Indians who overstayed their tourist
or work visas.
Another 40,000 Indians overstayed their visas in 2018.
In June 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said roughly
9,000 Indians were caught illegally entering the United States in 2018, up from
3,162 in 2017.
The 2018 Indian inflow was a surprise, one official told
Breitbart News in 2018. “Overwhelmingly [they are] claiming asylum, based on
political and religious discrimination back in India … it is not a script or
any particular document [but] every story is pretty much the same,” the
official said.
Many Indian illegal migrants are allowed out of detention to
get jobs before their asylum hearings, reportedly with bonds of only about
$20,000.
U.S.-based labor traffickers bring in most of the illegal
migrants who sneak across the border, he said.
The Indian “facilitators in the United States are using them
as indentured servants [saying] ‘Come work for me three to four years, and
every paycheck I keep so much until you pay off your [debt],” the official
said.
Mexican coyotes deliver the migrants to the border after
taking their passports and other identification, he said. The migrants then get
caught, ask for asylum, and are released because of the enormous backup in the
immigration courts. Once released, the migrants can begin working for their
Indian traffickers.
The identification documents are returned to the migrants
once they pay off their smuggling debts, the official said.
This current inflow of Indian illegals is so large that it
has created its own backlog of almost 30,000 migrant Indians waiting for asylum
hearings, according to June 2019 data federal data tracked by Syracuse
University.
Indian migrants have many opportunities to plead for asylum
in the United States because India is so diverse. For example, Muslim and Hindu
communities have been fighting each other for decades in Kashmir and other
districts, while Sikhs, Christians, and lower-caste Indians suffer
discrimination in the Hindu-dominated, caste-divided, polyglot patchwork
country of roughly 1.4 billion people.
In response to the Indian migration, U.S. officials have
begun telling Indian asylum applicants that they must first seek safety in safe
areas of their home country before they can ask for asylum in the United
States.
Neil Munro
✔@NeilMunroDC
Trump's appointee Ken Cuccinelli at USCIS reminds his asylum
officers they can't give asylum to migrants who didn't seek safety in their
home country. This is just one of many initiatives in admin's 'broad strategy'
to prevent a worldwide rush to America. http://bit.ly/2ZrHhAQ
Some Indian illegal migrants are protesting judges’
deportation decisions by going on hunger strike until they are released into
the United States. “My clients feel that the detention system has not been
fair, and they have met with judges who have an inherent bias against asylum
cases from India,” their attorney Linda Corchado, told the India-West website.
The inflow of Indian illegals rarely makes the news because
it is not yet a recognized idea in the established media — and it is
overshadowed by the huge inrush of Central American migrants. Also, many
newspapers hire immigrants to cover the immigration beat, so shifting the focus
of media coverage towards the concerns of migrants, and away from the sordid
business of labor trafficking and the politically important issue of the
Americans’ priorities.
However, the media mentions are rising, partly because of
trafficking deaths and the growing federal efforts to detain and deport the
Indian illegals. In June 2019, for example, Reuters reported:
A six-year-old girl from India died of heat stroke in an
Arizona desert after her mother left her with other migrants to go in search of
water, a medical examiner and U.S. Border Patrol said on Friday.
The girl, Gurupreet Kaur, soon to celebrate her seventh
birthday, was found by U.S. Border Patrol west of Lukeville, Arizona on
Wednesday, when temperatures reached a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42
Celsius), U.S. Border Patrol and the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner
(PCOME) said.
A pro-migration Indian activist blamed the U.S. government
for the little girl’s death and urged that the government welcome migrants.
“U.S. border militarization, forced migration, and rejection of migrants
attempting to cross at ports of entry have created an environment where a child
like Gurupreet can die in the desert, alone,” Lakshmi Sridaran, interim
co-executive director of South Asians Leading Together, told the IndiaWest.com
news site. She continued:
Until this system is completely defunded and a new one is
created that upholds the dignity of all migrants – we will continue to see
unspeakable tragedies, notwithstanding the countless deaths that go
undocumented. While ICE and CBP have experienced unprecedented surges in their
budgets, their treatment of migrants has plunged to new lows.
In January 2019, immigration officials used a fake university
to catch up to 600 Indian graduates who were violating visa rules to win U.S.
college-graduate jobs.
Neil Munro
✔@NeilMunroDC
Feds use a fake university to bust college-grad labor
traffickers who funneled at least 600 Indian grads into jobs around the US. The
trafficking was hidden within the quasi-legal workforce of 1.5 million H-1B,
OPT, L-1, TN, etc. white-collar visa-workers. http://bit.ly/2GeYkPN
Also, federal law enforcement officials have arrested
numerous Indian-born business executives and corporations for fraudulently
getting H-1B visa workers into jobs sought by American graduates. In August
2018, Breitbart News reported:
Pradyumna Kumar Samal, allegedly lied to federal agencies
when he said the visa-workers were imported for existing contracts, and he
allegedly effectively forced his Indian employees to work for less than the
promised wage-levels, said the [federal] statement:
“Nearly 200 workers may have been brought in under the phony
applications. The employees were forced
to pay SAMAL’s companies a partially-refundable “security deposit” of as much
as $5,000 for the visa filings, regardless of whether they were assigned to any
projects that provided them with income.”
Federal officials downplay the scale of Indian illegal
migration and say little about the number of Indian migrants who are sent home.
Laura Ingraham
✔@IngrahamAngle
Two ICE officers escorting three deportees (carrying white
plastic bags) through El Paso Airport. Destination: Newark then India.
The expanding flow of Indian legal and illegal migrants
spotlights the vast population of poor young Indians, and also the Indian
government’s economic strategy of exporting workers to other countries,
including the United States.
India’s population is so huge that India has roughly 178
million young men aged 20 to 34. That number is more than one young Indian male
for every two Americans in the entire U.S. population of 326 million.
In February 2019, the Forsyth County News reported from an
community of Indian WalMart employees in Arkansas
Ani Agnihotri, program chair of the USA-India Business Summit
… said India has a massive and young population that could provide skilled,
English-speaking workers ready to relocate “even at a seven-day notice” and
said the majority of doctors in the United Kingdom and about 15 percent in
America are of Indian descent.
“India has the youngest population in the world. About 25
percent of the population of India, which is 1.25 billion, is below the age of
25,” he said. “We will be the provider of the workforce of the world in about
15 years, after 2035.”
Indian officials want to swap their cheap labor to U.S.
investors in exchange for a larger flow of remittances, contracts, expertise,
technology, and energy back into India. The two sides have gradually created a
U.S-India Outsourcing Economy, which is worth roughly $78 billion to India each
year.
“The movement of high-skilled individuals, personnel, Indian
professionals in the U.S., through such programs as H-1B … has been a mutually
beneficial partnership,” Indian ambassador Harsh Shringla told a July meeting
of business lobbyists in D.C.
Neil Munro
✔@NeilMunroDC
India's ambassador explains why Indian gov't & biz are
pushing HR.1044 & S.386 green-card/country-caps bill. Bonus: He thanks
Dem/GOP Representatives for helping India's economic strategy with vote to
outsource more US graduates' jobs to Indian H-1B/OPTs. http://bit.ly/32RaerZ
U.S. and Indian businesses employ roughly at least 700,000
Indian visa-workers and 200,000 student-workers in the United States. This huge
workforce also brings at least 700,000 Indian-born family members into the
United States. Each year, about 20,000 of these temporary workers and their
family members get green cards via the “Adjustment of Status” process.
Some of these visa-workers hold jobs in elite companies, and
some of those have become senior executives of U.S. companies, including CEOs
of Google, Microsoft, and MasterCard, for example. Also, some of the teams
which have created valuable companies in the United States also include Indians
among their founders.
A large number of Indians living in the United States are
contract workers hired for routine technology jobs, including jobs at WalMart
and Bank of America, that would otherwise have gone to American graduates. Many
Indian visa workers are stuck in lower-wage software sweatshops, where they
work long hours in the hope of eventually getting green cards.
Indians display their success in business and education, for
example, by highlighting the success of Indian children in American civic
competitions, such as high school science competitions and spelling bees.
Some Indian visa-workers reject India’s cheap-labor business
style, and embrace American values.
Many of the Indians bring their own culture and politics into
the United States. This diversity includes pro-Hindu political parties,
regional nepotism, as well as the 4,000-year-old ideas of caste.
The caste system creates a civic hierarchy, and it is so ingrained
in Indian society, Hinduism, marriage rules, parenting, education, and careers
that it is visible in Indians’ DNA, according to a 2013 press release by
Harvard Medical School:
“This genetic data tells us a three-part cultural and
historical story,” said [Harvard professor David] Reich, who is also an
associate member of the Broad Institute. “Prior to about 4000 years ago there
was no mixture. After that, widespread mixture affected almost every group in
India, even the most isolated tribal groups. And finally, endogamy [marriage
within caste] set in and froze everything in place.”
Caste distinctions are almost completely invisible to
Americans, but Indian Hindu H-1B workers have told Breitbart News distinctions
can be obvious in casual contact, names, and in business developments.
Neil Munro
✔@NeilMunroDC
You're racist for opposing US corps hiring cheap Indian
contract-workers to fill jobs sought by American grads & millennials, says
lobbyist working with Sen. Mike Lee & Kamala Harris. Group is very close to
passing a green-cards-for-Indian-grads giveaway http://bit.ly/2KVaUag
The caste system gets little criticism from American
progressives because they expect to gain an overwhelming share of votes from
immigrant Indians.
Many U.S professionals have told Breitbart News that
Indian-born managers bring their Indian cultural practices into American
workplaces.
“Indian [managers] only hire Indians because they can
manipulate them, exploit them, and the young workers just take it because [any
job in the United States] is better than being back in a poverty-stricken
nation,” said Jay Palmer, a software expert who forced to train his Indian
replacement when he was pushed out of his Florida job at Disney Corp. Indians
in the United States, “will work 70 to 80 hours a week … and they won’t
complain.”
In a lawsuit against Infosys, a major Indian company
operating in the United States, American witnesses reported;
Hiring Manager Instructions: an Infosys hiring manager
admitted “There does exist an element of discrimination. We are advised to hire
Indians … because they will work off the clock without murmur and they can
always be transferred across the nation without hesitation unlike [a] local
workforce.”
Talent Acquisition Unit Observations: Recruiters in Talent
Acquisition observed that Indians were highly favored, and it was extremely
difficult to move non-South Asians ahead in the hiring process. Non-Indians
were regularly rejected as being “not a good fit,” – an Infosys euphemism for
“non-Indian.” This discrimination is on-going. In 2016 for example, an Infosys
manager in their Talent Acquisition Unit observed that of Infosys’ 2,900 hires
in the United States, 2,200 (76%) were Indian. She observed a similar hiring
disparity in prior years.
Applicant Data Manipulation: Infosys manipulates applicant
tracking data in such a way that consideration of non-South Asians and
non-Indians is minimized, and the hiring of South Asians is maximized. For
example, recruiters have observed that non-South Asian applicants were
repeatedly deleted from Infosys’ applicant tracking system, forcing one
recruiter to keep a separate spreadsheet of applicants on his computer.
Recruiters have also observed South Asian applicants, located by Infosys’
“sourcers” in India, manually entered into the applicant tracking system
despite those individuals not having formally applied, thus streamlining the
hiring process. Individuals sourced in this way were moved “to the front of the
line” ahead of applicants in the U.S. A recruiter also observed that
applications for United States positions were regularly not reviewed, and in
2016, approximately 11,000 to 12,000 were rejected en masse.
The growing population of Indians in the United States has
increased the diversity of crimes. In 2017, for example, ICE reported:
the owner of several Milwaukee-area gas stations was charged
Tuesday with forced labor involving aggravated sexual abuse, harboring an alien
for financial gain, and document servitude …
Harshinder Bhatia, 58, forced and threatened an Indian national woman to
work causing her to believe that if she did not perform such labor and
services, she would suffer serious harm.
The indictment charges that this crime involved aggravated sexual abuse
and was furthered by Bhatia possessing the victim’s passport.
In 2015, ICE reported:
Naga Srinivasa Rao Pilla, 38, faces a maximum penalty of 15
years in federal prison for bribery of a public official. Pilla was also
charged with procurement of citizenship or naturalization unlawfully, which
carries a maximum penalty of 10 years … According to the criminal complaint,
Pilla, who was ordered removed by an immigration judge, offered to pay the ICE
officer $2,000 to help him obtain immigration benefits.
In 2009, a United States consulate in India reported very
high levels of corporate and official corruption:
H-1B fraud is one of the top two visa categories for fraud
throughout Mission India. All posts regularly encounter inflated or fabricated
educational and employment qualifications. The vast majority of these documents
come from Hyderabad. In the 18 months prior to the start-up of consular
operations in Hyderabad, FPU Chennai investigated 150 companies in Hyderabad,
77 percent of which turned out to be fraudulent or highly suspect (ref F). Most
of those cases slated for site visits were to verify the experience letters for
H-1B applicants who did not meet minimum educational qualifications.
Tighter procedures helped block migrants who were pretending
to be clerics, the consulate reported:
During the last two years, most R-1 [religious worker visa]
fraud was detected amongst Tibetan refugees, Sikh raagis, and Hindu priests …
R-1 fraud includes both fraudulent beneficiaries and fictitious inviting
parties. Since DHS began requiring petitions for R-1 applicants in November,
R-1 fraud referrals have almost completely dried up. Since DHS requires 100
percent on-site verification of petitioners, however, many potential R-1
applicants now apply for B1/B2 visas in an attempt to avoid closer scrutiny.
USCIS officials also stepped up oversight of Indians with
religious visas in the United States. In 2011, for example, ICE reported:
On Nov. 10, a federal jury in the Eastern District of
Wisconsin found Sagarsen Haldar, 31, aka Gopal Hari Das, guilty of conspiring
to commit immigration fraud. Haldar identifies himself as the founder,
president, CEO, and spiritual leader of Gaudiya Vaisnava Society (GVS), a
religious temple located at 2425 W. Ramsey Ave. in Milwaukee.
According to evidence at trial, Haldar conspired to sponsor
more than two dozen Indian nationals to enter the country under religious
worker or “R-1” visas. Typically, the R-1 applications falsely stated that the
individuals were religious workers from India who planned to be priests and
perform religious work at the GVS temple in Milwaukee. In fact, the Indian
nationals had no religious training or experience, and had no intention of
being priests or performing religious work once they arrived in the United
States.
Indians complain that their society is riddled with official
and caste corruption. In April 2019, for example, the country’s former
education minister revealed that she had padded her resume by claiming to have
won a college degree. India.com reported:
Union Minister Smriti Irani on Thursday accepted that she
doesn’t have a college degree. In her poll affidavit, Smriti Irani said that
she did enrol for an undergraduate course in Delhi University but did “did not
complete the three-year degree course”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces the same accusations.
Immigration Numbers
Immigration is a government economic strategy which seeks to
stimulate economic growth and stock prices by inflating the supply of labor and
consumers.
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the
workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes
about 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health
care, engineering or science, software, or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million
legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million
white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and
spouses — and about 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also
prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about
eight million illegal workers, and rarely punishes companies for employing the
hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or
overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the new labor supply boosts stock
values for investors by ensuring that employers do not have to compete in a
free market for American workers with offers of higher wages and better working
conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign,
white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth from young
employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces
high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts
children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away
from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans,
including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth
from the Heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs,
shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating
low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
The federal government does not inflate the supply of money
because it fears inflation would damage the value of money.
Neil Munro
✔@NeilMunroDC
The NYT insists there is no money worth following in the
immigration debate. This is Flat Earth journalism, and it allows NYT's snob
staff & readers to throw the Racist! smear at millions of normal Americans
who worry about their families' wages & housing http://bit.ly/2NlUEPU
Amazon Opens Biggest Campus Yet – in India
LUCAS NOLAN
E-commerce giant Amazon has opened its largest campus yet,
but it is not its American HQ2, it is located in Hyderabad, India, as the firm
prepares for aggressive expansion in the country.
Bloomberg reports that Amazon has opened its largest campus
building ever in the south Indian city of Hyderabad in preparation for
aggressive expansion in an attempt to compete with retail giant Walmart in
India. Amazon is making a huge push in India where the majority of commerce is
still done through small brick and mortar family-owned shops.
Amazon’s country manager for India, Amit Agarwal, commented
on the Indian retail market stating: “E-commerce is so small in India relative
to the total consumption, less than 3%.” Last year, Walmart spent $16 billion
to purchase India’s biggest startup, Flipkart Online Services Pvt. in an effort
to expand within the country. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has stated that the firm
will invest $5.5 billion as part of its India expansion.
Amazon’s new campus is the first building the company has owned
outside of the United States and spans 1.8 million square feet of office space
and will accommodate approximately 15,000 workers. John Schoettler, vice
president of Amazon’s Global Real Estate and Facilities, commented: “The
largest buildings in Seattle house about 5,000 employees.”
Agarwal added: “This facility will build services globally,”
citing Amazon Web Servers, Kindle, Alexa, Amazon.in and Amazon Home Services as
services that could be expanded from the Hyderabad offices. Agarwal noted that
Amazon Home Services is “innovating on things like doorstep pick-up and
electronics repair.”
Amazon is also reportedly in negotiations to purchase a 10
percent stake in one of the largest brick and mortar retailers in India, Future
Retail. Local media reported that Amazon is aiming to add food delivery to its
list of Indian services and is in negotiations with multiple food companies to
launch the service.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues
of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or
email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
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