Thursday 18 August 2016 11:27 am

Amazon’s creating more than a thousand new jobs in Essex

Brexit, what Brexit? Amazon is creating more than a thousand new jobs in Essex with the opening of a new fulfilment centre in the area, it has announced.

The centre will be located in Tilbury and Amazon plans to open the facility by spring next year.

The latest depot adds to three research and development centres – where drone technology development is taking place – headquarters in London, as well as plans for new data centres to support the growth of Amazon Web Services (AWS) by early next year

“We are excited to announce that we will be opening our thirteenth fulfilment centre in the UK in Tilbury in spring 2017 to enable us to continue to expand our product selection, support more third party sellers including small businesses with our fulfilment expertise and meet growing customer demand in the UK," said Amazon's vice president of UK operations John Tagawa.

The 1,500 new jobs are permanent full-time positions and will include operations managers, engineers as well as roles in IT and HR. The centre will also be the third to adopt Amazon's latest robot technology which speeds up the picking of items off the shelf for sending out.

The Tilbury depot will follow two further new locations in Manchester and Coalville in Leicestershire which are due to open this autumn with 1,500 new roles in the next three years. Another depot in Doncaster will open next summer with the addition of 500 jobs.

Amazon will open a new headquarters in London with room for 5,000 people in 2017 and has remained committed to plans for building new data centres despite Brexit.

The new opening forms part of Amazon's wider plans to create thousands of new jobs across Europe – 3,500 of them permanent positions in the UK.

The company said it has invested more than £4.6bn in the UK economy since 2010 and employee numbers will reach 15,500 by the end of the year.