👩🏾💻 Today, @amazon $AMZN announced the creation of 2,000 job openings. These positions will include specialist roles in areas such as customer service, technology, cloud services, finance and accounting.
📰 Read more » https://t.co/UF4QPpTCN4 pic.twitter.com/DUQT9kmwE7
— CINDE | Invest in Costa Rica (@invest_cr) June 26, 2019
Such massive employment numbers didn’t come overnight for Amazon, but the company’s expansion has been relatively quick.
Amazon landed in Costa Rica back in 2008 and hired 75 people specifically for its CX operations. From that point on, the retail giant has been growing at a very fast pace. Announcements to hire 2,000 workers were made in 2019, 2020 and 2021. In August 2022, the company had 3,000 customer service positions that it aimed to fill during a job fair in the capital city of San Jose. According to Amazon’s own data, between 2017 and 2021, its number of collaborators in Costa Rica had practically tripled: from 5,000 to 15,000.
In 2023, the company laid off 18,000 workers globally. There are no official numbers on how many of those employees were located in Costa Rica, but industry sources estimate that, as of today, Amazon’s Costa Rican headcount remains somewhere near 15,000.
Too much Amazon?
It is said that Costa Rica has perhaps grown too popular in the BPO industry for its own good. The country is regarded as one of Latin America’s main hubs for global services delivery, for shared services centers and for traditional BPO operations. All that popularity, however, has also made Costa Rica one of the most expensive options for delivery in the whole region.
Though not the only major player in the country, Amazon’s huge presence has contributed considerably to the perception of Costa Rica’s main cities –San Jose and Heredia, specifically– as sites where one has to pay a premium only to secure a place to operate in.
“Costa Rica offers many amazing benefits to companies who want to outsource there,” commented a top BPO executive, who asked to remain nameless. “Based on the numbers it seems like Amazon controls a large percentage of the BPO workforce and is the big fish in Costa Rica.”
Costa Rica is far from Amazon’s top priority in Latin America. Mexico and Brazil remain as the company’s main sites of operations in Latin America, a fact that can be glimpsed by the job openings available in each territory. Mexico tops the list with 422, currently; Brazil follows with 262; and Costa Rica is third with 117.
But even those numbers speak of Costa Rica’s relevance for Amazon’s regional operations. Costa Rica is a small country, with a population barely above 5 million. Economically, it doesn’t even crack the region’s top ten largest economies. Brazil and Mexico are largest and second largest countries in Latin America & the Caribbean both demographically and economically.
Even so, in the eyes of Amazon, Costa Rica ranks above regional powerhouses such as Colombia and Argentina, at least when it comes to the sourcing of talent.
And there’s a chance Costa Rica might upgrade its profile for international businesses. Since last year, US authorities have coordinated with the Costa Rican government to develop the country’s workforce and technological capabilities. The aim is to incorporate it into the regional semiconductors supply chain.
In other words: Costa Rica could be on the brink of a radical makeover.
Source link : https://nearshoreamericas.com/grasping-amazons-dominance-in-costa-rica/
Author :
Publish date : 2024-05-23 14:54:08
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
