Amazon is negotiating its entry in Portugal. It wants to go to Oporto

Amazon should be preparing an investment in Portugal, to start operating in the Portuguese market. The news were disclosed this Friday by Jornal de Negócios, quoting “a source close to the process”. According to the newspaper, the North-American giant for online shopping is already negotiating the acquisition a space in Oporto. The company makes no comments, but the same source disclosed that Amazon’s entry in the country might become official in the first quarter of this year.

Currently, as Jornal de Negócios recalls, the Portuguese can make purchases in Amazon’s Spanish version, but there is no offer directed towards the national market. But, in December of 2017, the company started having in Portugal some of its main technological products: the smart speaker Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Plus, equipped with the virtual assistant Alexa. Since then, ECO confirmed, the system became able to register those devices in Portuguese addresses, which was not possible before.

Amazon’s entry in Portugal is something that has been long hoped for, both by consumers and by analysts. The company headed by the multimillionaire Jeff Bezos already has operations in Spain and has been expanding at high speed. With a market cap of around 664 billion dollars, it had launched in 2016 a tool to allow small and medium enterprises to have its products in the internet shopping platform. No comments were made by the Government nor by Oporto’s municipality.

The news of the possibility of having Amazon come to Oporto comes up on the same week the prime minister, António Costa, stated that a service center and a technological hub from Google would be created in Oeiras (Lagoas Park), an investment that should create more than 500 job positions, an information confirmed by Google.

Also this week, Eurico Brilhante Dias, State secretary for Internationalization, confirmed that negotiations are underway with other multinational corporations aiming to have centers in Portugal. This hypothesis was already raised by Paddy Cosgrave, head of the Web Summit, in a Twitter post. Cosgrave spoke of “rumors” that other technological companies would be preparing to come to Portugal.