If you gathered every single employee Amazon hired last year together in one place, it would fill CenturyLink Field — and then some.
Amazon added 76,500 people to its workforce in 2015, which doubled the amount of employees it brought on during the year prior.
In its quarterly earnings report that posted on Thursday, Amazon noted that it now has a staggering 230,000 employees worldwide, not including seasonal workers. It added 8,400 people in Q4 2015 after adding 39,400 employees the prior quarter.
It’s important to note that Amazon’s headcount includes workers at the company’s fulfillment centers. Still, the growth is staggering in comparison to Amazon’s tech rivals.
To accommodate for the influx of employees, Amazon is expanding its footprint around its Seattle headquarters in the South Lake Union neighborhood, where construction cranes dot the landscape soon to be filled with multiple new Amazon buildings. The company employs 25,500 workers in the state of Washington and estimated this past September that its economic impact came out to about $5 billion in Washington last year.
Microsoft, meanwhile, says its overall global employment was 112,388 as of Dec. 31, a decrease of more than 3,500 since the September quarter. The company said last July that it was cutting 7,800 jobs as part of a broader restructuring, and those cuts often take several months to show up in the numbers.
Despite the cuts, the Redmond, Wash.-based company has actually added employees in the Seattle region and the United States overall during the past year. Microsoft says it employed 61,030 people in the U.S., including 42,970 in the Seattle area as of Dec. 31 2015. That’s up from 58,990 in the U.S. and 41,489 in the Seattle area at the same point the prior year.
Amazon missed revenue and earnings expectations for the fourth quarter, and its shares were pummeled in after-hours trading on Thursday despite strong trends in Amazon Prime memberships and Amazon Web Services revenue.
Hat tip footnoted
