E-commerce heavyweight Amazon has leased three floors in a building at the heart of Singapore’s financial district, setting sights for an expansion in the city-state.
According to Bloomberg, nine floors of Asia Square Tower 1 is currently leased to banking giant Citigroup. With its 10-year lease expiring and the COVID-19 pandemic forcing companies to opt for flexible work arrangements, Citigroup is currently reviewing and reducing its footprint in Singapore.
Amazon’s occupying three floors in Asia Square Tower 1 will cover approximately 90,000 square feet of office space.
Tech competition fierce in Singapore
Amazon’s expansion in Singapore comes after Zoom, Tencent, and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance recently announced plans to set up data centers and main offices in Singapore. And the lion city is already the Asian headquarter of Facebook and Google.
Commenting on this, Executive Vice-President Kiren Kumar of Singapore’s Economic Development Board said: “This will allow us to meet the growing demand for enterprise and consumer digital services in Singapore and Asia, and create meaningful jobs for Singaporeans in both tech and non-tech roles within the technology sector.”
As political uncertainty in Hong Kong continues, Singapore is becoming increasingly attractive for major tech firms. Tech companies are continuously building and expanding on software engineering, product development, e-commerce, and cloud.
Therefore, Singapore is set to become the new battleground for tech firms from the West and China to dominate the Southeast Asia market.
“Amazon is always in a state of innovation and disruption,” said Justin Tang, Head of Asian Research at United First Partners in Singapore. “Asia is a source of growth for them and they need to be near where their rivals are.”
Alongside this, Amazon has listed 200 job vacancies in Singapore on its site, corroborating reports of their large-scale expansion in Asia. Last year, Amazon launched its Singapore website, the first in Southeast Asia.
Image credit: Nicolas Lannuzel
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