Amazon has leased a 3,000 square meter building in the MATAM high-tech park at the southern entrance to Haifa and will be hiring 200 software engineers in the coming few weeks. Sources close to the deal in the MATAM high-tech park say that the premises will provide only temporary accommodation for Amazon until a 12,000 square meter building that the company has leased will be completed next year.
Last July, it was reported that Amazon had leased the 12,000 square meter building in Haifa as well as 25,000 square meters of office space in the Sarona Azrieli tower in Tel Aviv. Internal construction of the office space is not yet complete. All this real estate activity puts into solid perspective Amazon's planned expansion of operations in Israel both in terms of high-tech R&D development and taking advantage of the country's high-tech knowhow and e-commerce activities on the Israeli market.
Amazon has also been seeking a logistics center over the past six months and representatives who visited Israel to locate such a center also met with Israel's major food and retail companies. Amazon also advertised earlier this month for English to Hebrew translators for its Luxembourg office, clearly suggesting an expansion of its ecommerce operations in Israel.
Sources inform "Globes" that Amazon plans beginning ecommerce operations in Israel with books, clothes and textiles and food at a later stage.
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) has been operating in Israel since 2012 when it opened a 3,000 square meter development center in Herzliya. In 2015, Amazon acquired Israeli chipmaker Annapurna labs for $350 million and also opened a 5,000 square meter development center in Haifa's MATAM high-tech park where it has 300 employees. The company's employees are working on a range of development projects including delivery drones.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 15, 2018
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