Today, Amazon shared that it has committed over S$2 billion in Singapore for its retail and cloud proceeds in the current year, 2023. This entails both Cpex for instance developments in various structures of internal environments, including fulfilment centres, delivery stations, and data centres, and Opex in the form of technology, safety, programs for customers, delivery partners, SMBs, and compensation.
Keystone Strategy, a third-party consultancy firm, said that through the company’s presence in Singapore, it has created well over 4,000 indirect employment opportunities, including construction, logistics, and many other professions. Moreover, from a survey of selling businesses conducted by Amazon, selling businesses in Singapore have generated over 6,000 jobs to support their AMZ-related business. Together, Amazon enabled over 10,000 indirect employees in Singapore during 2023.
The local investment of Amazon remains in line with ongoing efforts to develop breakthrough solutions and services that would make Singaporean consumers happy and help Singapore players grow. “Since we began our operations in Singapore in 2010 and the Amazon.sg store in 2019, we have been able to build, invest, and expand our operations in the country with the help of our customers and selling partners,” Li added. “We are grateful to see it creating value for businesses in Singapore and are privileged to keep on contributing to Singapore’s economy and digitisation.”
After introducing Amazon Prime Now in 2017, which Amazon has renamed to Amazon Fresh, and introducing Amazon.sg in 2019, Amazon stepped up its efforts to provide a convenient shopping experience to its customers in the country. These investments have provided Amazon with the opportunity to offer same-day and next-day delivery for qualifying goods to customers in Singapore. Also, for people signing up for Amazon Prime membership in Singapore, there is Prime Video, where members can stream hundreds of award-winning movies and TV episodes, and Prime Gaming, where members can enjoy instant digital access to popular video games.
Currently, over ten thousand Singaporean companies—quite a few of which are SMEs—source their products to the Amazon store. Using the Amazon Global Selling solution, Singapore selling partners can sell their products to global Amazon customers. Amazon continues to expand its resources, facilities, and programs through which it supports its selling partners and helps them increase the performance of their businesses with Amazon. This includes tools based on generative AI, for instance, the option for selling partners to submit URLs to their websites, thus enabling Amazon to quickly generate high-quality product detail pages for selling partners, thereby allowing the partners to optimise other invaluable business activities.
In 2023, it introduced the “Singapore Cross-border Brand Launchpad” with support from Enterprise Singapore and the Singapore Business Federation to over 100 micro, small, and medium enterprises to start up or expand their brands and market, targeting export opportunities in the United States by 2025.
AWS has been helping Singapore reach its digital transformation goal by enabling Singaporean companies to modernise their IT and securely innovate at scale since the company began operating in Singapore in 2010. At the moment, thousands of Singapore customers actively using AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region are Grab, the Maritime & Port Authority of Singapore, Singlife, Synapxe, and others for digital transformation. Having been in the AI space for more than 25 years, AWS is helping Singaporean organisations to build solutions using AI and generative AI for the first time in each of the industries. More recently, AWS has announced its AI flagship program—AWS AI Spring, a complex partnership with the Singapore government, public sector bodies, and businesses to support AI and generative AI across Singapore.
Amazon has always supported the community, and this has been evidenced by its operations. As part of the Delivering Smiles program in 2023, Amazon Singapore also provided $100,000 in cash to 4 non-profit organisations in Singapore, including Children’s Wishing Well, Club Rainbow (Singapore), Fei Yue Family Service Centre, and Glyph Community, to enhance children and youths’ learning environments and the ways they learn to play and develop for the long term. In 2022 and 2023, AWS InCommunities supported a Science Centre Singapore initiative, The Youth STEM Empowerment program, which helped students to design STEM innovative products and solutions for solving community issues. In the more recent past, Amazon and IMDA, part of Singapore’s national Digital for Life movement, briefed on the publicization of community workshops in adequate skills that include safe online shopping and the generation of AI. These educational programs are operated by Amazon.sg, Amazon Payments, and AWS corporate volunteers with assistance from IMDA. Since 2017, AWS itself has educated more than 400,000 people in Singapore on cloud skills.
Amazon is serious about investing in and growing sustainability in all of the products it has in Singapore. The two are a 62 MW solar project with Sunseap and a 17.6 MW project with Sembcorp, both in Singapore. These projects will collectively produce renewable energy to provide power to close to 20,000 homes in Singapore per year. The company is trying its best to lower delivery packaging at its Singapore fulfilment centres. Starting from the year 2021/21, Amazon has extended the number of non-food delivery packages reaching Singaporean consumers directly from the company’s Fulfilment Centre by 80%. Through partnering with brands on their packaging, more and more aspects of what consumers purchase from Amazon—including nappies, toilet rolls, and bottled drinks—can be delivered to Singaporean homes without the need for delivery packaging.
Employees will find career opportunities and mobility programs at Amazon to combine opportunities for its workforce by creating a safe, inclusive, and welcoming workplace for employees while working towards Amazon’s goal of becoming the Earth’s best employer company. In 2023, to eradicate inequality and provide a better future for people with disabilities, Amazon established an MoU with SG Enable, the focal agency for disability in Singapore, to include PDWP at all Amazon operation facilities in Singapore. Amazon ranked itself on the LinkedIn Top Companies Top 10 list in 2023 for Singapore; the Best Places to Work List is published annually; this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Singapore has been up for approval from its workers and was later endorsed by the Great Place To Work® Institute for the year 2024.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: managing for the long term, passion for invention, obsession with customers rather than competitors, and devotion to operational excellence. It runs purely on the passion for constructing technologies, coming up with products, & offering services that can transform lives. We introduce change proactively and promptly and are comfortable with the risk of making a mistake. Being large enough to have the capability to offer the best to our clients and small enough to have the passion to do so.
