Rakuten is still the 800-pound gorilla in Japan’s e-commerce arena (70 million accounts are hard to beat), but Amazon Japan is doing pretty well, too, it seems (here’s a case study comparing the two companies). According to a recent report in business daily The Nikkei, big A plans to hire Japanese graduates coming straight out of college for the first time ever in spring 2012.
In other words, Amazon Japan is becoming more of a local company that takes the long-term “risk” of trying to build up talent internally (so far, only mid-career professionals were hired). Details are scarce, but the Nikkei does say Amazon aims at recruiting “several dozen” graduates next spring and that they plan to continue to hire graduates in the years to follow, too.
Amazon Japan was established as early as November 2000, and while the current number of employees isn’t disclosed, LinkedIn lists 142 people currently working for the company (obviously, the actual number should be much higher).
In the past few years, Amazon has been expanding its Japan business aggressively, for example by adding new categories (and products) to their catalog, building distribution centers all over the country to speed up delivery (the most recent ones are located in Aichi and Miyagi), or opening data centers for AWS.
Serkan Toto