These are Amazon’s new headquarters
After a tough competition, Crystal City in Virginia and Long Island City in New York were left with the first places to be the new headquarters of Amazon
Amazon is one of the most profitable companies in the world and one of the technological giants next to Facebook or Google. The business model, like many others in the new stage of the internet, came to change the marketing paradigms: when it started Amazon was a bookstore without books. Instead of physically having the book units, which would then diversify IGNORE INTO the wide variety of products available today, Amazon offered a channel to connect those who produced the books and their buyers. In this way, Amazon has grown to offer services ranging from its own reading medium, the Kindle, to a premium television service. Due to this success, Jeff Bezos, its founder, was considered in 2017 as the richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
Leer en español: Estas son nuevas sedes centrales de Amazon
In this panorama of success, the Amazon HQ2 was located, an initiative created in 2017 that sought to create a new headquarters for the company, expanding its offices in Seattle (HQ1) to the site that obtained the first place. This initiative, which quickly showed itself as a competition, was hosted in a large number of US cities, and some Mexican and Canadian, although in the list of 20 finalists there was a large concentration of cities in the US, only with Los Angeles as a representative of the west and Toronto as the only non-US city, according to the Washington Post, which Bezos owns.
The rules of competition
In order to reach this list of finalists, the cities that were in competition had to meet certain specific requirements : in the first place, they had to be cities with a population of more than one million people, that is, with a high demographic density that allowed them to comply with the expectations of anticipated jobs.
Additionally, the specific area where the HQ2 was planned to be built should be in a range of 30 miles near a population center; a maximum 45 minutes from an international airport, which had a good connection to Seattle (hence the interest in the eastern part of the United States); easy access to main roads; and the possibility of physical expansion of the space to be developed. All these characteristics were also pointed out by the Washington Post in September of 2017 when the race began.
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The interest shown by all the cities involved was quite high, because the promises of an alliance with Amazon, which included 50,000 jobs and an investment of 5 billion, which would not only benefit the company in the construction of its headquarters, but also that would also bring an investment for the chosen city, made the different communities look for strategies to convince the richest man in the world.
From advertising campaigns to strategies to ingratiate yourself with Amazon as a company, mayors and cities tried everything. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, Bezos had in mind from the beginning the area of Washington and its surroundings, so Arlington, Virginia stood out. In the end, on November 13, 2018 it was announced that Crystal City, in Arlington, Virginia; and Long Island City, in Queens, New York, was left with the Amazon crown in a decision that reversed the first statements of the company, it was decided to hold two venues, instead of just one, and thus expand its area of influence.
Why expand?
Several economists speculated throughout the competition process, which led to bets and preliminary scenarios, where it was analyzed from the news published by the Washington Post to the travel itinerary of Bezos as signals of a previous negotiation. In the Seattle Times, they considered the decision of the Amazon CEO as a warning signal for the city of its first headquarters, because of they tough that Seattle had lost business capacity, to the detriment of a city like New York, but even more, as a challenge in front of cities like Crystal City.
However, it has also been suggested that Bezos' decision is due to the titanic size of his company, which has reached previously unsuspected levels. This decision would then put the cities to offer their best side in order to obtain an alliance with this market giant and Bezos, in turn, would obtain a space with all the growth conditions at his disposal. Seen in this way could even touch your decision with the millionaire philanthropy of characters like Elon Musk, although the reasons are more economic cut than anything else. The only clear thing is that Amazon does not think to stop on its way to dominating the entire market on the Internet.
LatinAmerican Post | Jorge Ovalle
Translated from "Amazon tiene nuevas sedes centrales: Virginia y New York"
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