Amazon's plan for 100,000 new jobs in the US may not exactly be what Trump was looking for
REUTERS/Carlos Barria
The announcement, coming a month after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, certainly plays nice with Trump's job creation rhetoric and should help Amazon ease its tension with the President-elect, who's frequently criticized the company during his campaign.
But the new jobs may not exactly be focused on the traditional labor-force jobs in areas like manufacturing or infrastructure, where Trump won his biggest support. Instead, most of them are likely to be concentrated in the highly-skilled tech positions, based on Amazon's total number of job listings, put together by Baird Equity Research's Colin Sebastian.
As seen in the chart below, more than half of the current job listings are in "technology," like computer engineering or data scientists jobs. Only a tiny fraction (~5%) are in fulfillment centers, where products are stored and packaged for delivery and require less skills.
To be clear, Amazon did state "many" of the 100,000 new jobs will go to its fulfillment centers, although it did not give a breakdown of corporate versus fulfillment jobs. Also, Amazon has been significantly expanding its fulfillment network lately, building 26 new facilities in 2016 alone, up from 14 in 2015.
In a statement, Bezos stressed that a lot of the jobs would be in "local communities" and not just in Amazon's home turf of Seattle or Silicon Valley.
"These jobs are not just in our Seattle headquarters or in Silicon Valley - they're in our customer service network, fulfillment centers and other facilities in local communities throughout the country," Bezos said.
Still, it's hard to imagine Amazon drastically shifting its job openings to fulfillment positions in such a short period of time, especially when a big chunk of its new investments are expected to be in building streaming content, growing overseas markets (India), and strengthening its Alexa/Echo ecosystem, as seen in this chart by Evercore's Ken Sena.
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