That’s right people: Amazon is opening a branch in Australia in 2013. I have mentioned this before but the announcement seems to have passed people by. Today at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I asked a panel consisting of Roderick Poole, Michael Heyward and Henry Rosenbloom – the CEOs of Writers Victoria, Text Publishing and Scribe Publishing respectively – about the impact of Amazon opening in Oz. Their unanimous reaction was ‘WHAT?!’ Then Roderick asked a large room of people if they’d heard this news; no-one else had. ‘Sif I would be mistaken about something this huge.
This link advertised (and has ‘no longer’ advertised) this job as follows:
Sales Engineer – Amazon Web Services Rackspace Softlayer IaaS
Location Sydney NSW 2000
Salary $90,000 to $120,000 p.a.
Industry IT & Telecommunications
Reference no. 1289659_CITIJW
Company name IT Jobs | CITI Recruitment
Date listed 31 July 2012 (Posted 25 days 9 hours ago)
Sales Engineer – Amazon Web Services Rackspace Softlayer IaaS
Sydney CBD
Competitive salary and package available !
See how many times SYDNEY was mentioned? And this is only one of many jobs advertised for Amazon in Australia.
On April 18 2012 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Amazon was looking to purchase warehouses in Australia. I’ve heard that Amazon has purchased warehouses in Australia but I haven’t confirmed this claim.
Michael Heyward, CEO of Text Publishing, said that Australian emerging authors have traditionally been supported by independent booksellers – your local bookshops – where people have discovered these fresh new authors. (Not a direct quote but as near as I can recall to Michael’s intent.)
UPDATE: Valerie Khoo tweeted this link to a Sydney Morning Herald article about Amazon’s ‘worst kept secret’ being Amazon’s intentions to provide Australian-based cloud support (web hosting service). From what I’ve heard, this cloud support is actually the first step in setting up the IT infrastructure for Amazon online sales in Australia. Time will tell.
Tsana Dolchiva pointed out that the biggest threat to local retailers would be same day delivery service.
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