AMZN Amazon.com Inc

By Laura Stevens 

Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday said the online retail giant plans to create more than 100,000 full-time jobs in the U.S. by mid-2018, becoming the latest company to promise job creation during president-elect Donald Trump's first term.

The additional jobs would swell Amazon's U.S. workforce, which stood at 180,000 last year. The Seattle-based company said that many of the new jobs will be at already announced warehouses under construction in Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey and elsewhere.

"Innovation is one of our guiding principles at Amazon, and it's created hundreds of thousands of American jobs," said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. He added that some of the new jobs would be in areas such as cloud technology, machine learning, and advanced logistics.

Amazon's announcement follows a meeting last month between Mr. Trump and Silicon Valley executives, in which he struck a conciliatory tone after months of criticism of the companies on the campaign trail.

During the 90-minute meeting, Mr. Trump told the 13 executives, including Mr. Bezos, that he would work with them to foster innovation and to support fair-trade deals. The group also discussed job creation. Mr. Trump had accused companies including Apple Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. during the campaign of sending jobs overseas.

Mr. Bezos said in a statement at the time that Mr. Trump's promised focus on innovation "would create a huge number of jobs across the whole country, in all sectors, not just tech -- agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing -- everywhere."

The biggest source of jobs at Amazon is its warehouses, which process and ship orders. Amazon opened about two dozen new warehouses in the third quarter of last year, prompting costs to soar in part due to those investments, the company said. That brought its total number of warehouses globally to about 150.

Over the holidays, Amazon said it hired 120,000 seasonal workers in the U.S. and that thousands of those will stay on as the company continues to expand.

Other roles will include engineer and software development, created in part by Amazon's expansion into its cloud business and other fields. However, new technology Amazon and others are developing, such as artificial intelligence, is replacing human workers.

Amazon also aims to handle more of its package deliveries itself, according to people familiar with the matter, something that could lead to indirect job growth. It said "hundreds of thousands of jobs" could be created through programs such as its Flex citizen-driver program, where people with a car and a smartphone can earn up to $25 an hour delivering packages although they aren't full-time Amazon employees.

Amazon joins a host of companies that have been announcing thousands of new jobs to roll out under the Trump administration, with job creation having been a key promise during Mr. Trump's campaign. Earlier this week, Alibaba Group Holding Inc.'s Chief Executive Jack Ma met with the president-elect and made a bold, if vague, promise to create new U.S. jobs.

Similar to Mr. Ma's proposal, Amazon said Thursday that jobs could be created indirectly for small sellers who offer their goods on Amazon's marketplace.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump had accused Amazon's CEO of buying the Washington Post to influence politics. "If I become president, oh do they have problems," Mr. Trump said. Mr. Bezos had been critical of Mr. Trump as well during the campaign, saying in October that the candidate's behavior "erodes democracy around the edges."

Amazon's share price was one of the hardest hit in the days directly following Mr. Trump's election, tumbling 9% to as low as about $719 before recovering.

Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 12, 2017 11:32 ET (16:32 GMT)

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