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Interview
marcela topor - 2 October 2016 2.00 h

Fulfilling a growing need

Fred Pattje Each Wednesday evening, El Punt Avui TV airs the series of interviews, Catalan Connections. Marcela Topor talked to the General Operations Manager for Amazon Spain, Dutchman Fred Pattje.
- marcela topor
Fred, you are here to talk about a major pro­ject: you are open­ing a new ful­fill­ment cen­tre in Cor­nellà de Llo­bre­gat, near Barcelona.
Yes, we are re­ally pleased to have the op­por­tu­nity to re­ally move into Cat­alo­nia. We've done it maybe for three rea­sons. The first one is that we have a lot of clients here, a lot of cus­tomers, and we wanted to be close to them. The sec­ond one is that this is a great por­tal to south­ern Eu­rope and Eu­rope in gen­eral. In Barcelona we will use the ful­fill­ment cen­tre, which is a dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­tre, for an­other rea­son as well: we want to ful­fill a lot of or­ders out­side Cat­alo­nia, out­side Spain, and we're going to do that from Barcelona. And the third rea­son is very im­por­tant, it is the pool of tal­ent we have here and to be found in Cat­alo­nia. We talked to a uni­ver­sity, the Politècnica of Barcelona, and to some very good and strong busi­ness schools, such as ESADE.
This pro­ject is one of the most im­por­tant, if not the most im­por­tant, that has been de­vel­oped in Cat­alo­nia in the past five years in terms of in­vest­ment, but also in terms of jobs.
Yes, it is the main pro­ject of the past five years in terms of job cre­ation, and in the top six or seven in terms of in­vest­ment. We are ex­pect­ing to hire over 5,000 peo­ple and the total in­vest­ment will be over 200 mil­lion euros, which is quite im­pres­sive.
Be­fore talk­ing about this pro­ject more deeply I would like to ask you about your back­ground. You are Dutch. You've been liv­ing, in many places around the world. Tell me what brought you here and, be­fore that, your back­ground in terms of stud­ies and your pro­fes­sional ca­reer.
I was born in the Nether­lands, so my ori­gin is Dutch. I stud­ied eco­nom­ics in Am­s­ter­dam and then I moved to the UK to study more about mar­ket­ing and sales, and also to im­prove my Eng­lish, which is the lan­guage of busi­ness.
Eng­lish is ob­vi­ously very im­por­tant, and I was going to ask you where you learnt your Eng­lish.
Well, you know, Eng­lish is pretty com­mon in the Nether­lands, its the sec­ond lan­guage, and as a kid of eight you learn it; it's a part of the ed­u­ca­tion pro­gramme.
Sec­ondly, you learn re­ally fast watch­ing tele­vi­sion, which is all sub­ti­tled in Dutch, so most of the pro­grammes are in Eng­lish and then sub­ti­tled in Dutch, mean­ing that you have to learn Eng­lish, there's no other way around it. That's why you see such a high level of Eng­lish among Dutch peo­ple.
So you learned it in Hol­land and you im­proved it in the UK, right?
Yes, there's one thing, of course, about learn­ing Eng­lish, which every­one does, which is start­ing to un­der­stand busi­ness Eng­lish, which is a type of Eng­lish. If you re­ally want to get your­self out of your com­fort zone, you have to do it. And that's why I wanted to learn not just in gen­eral but specif­i­cally busi­ness Eng­lish. I spent two years there. Then I heard that Apple com­put­ers was ex­pand­ing to Spain, and I had a fam­ily mem­ber who worked at Apple who told me: “Why don't you call in and, you know, go to Spain?” Which I did. So I found them in Paris, they in­vited me, and soon after, I was work­ing and set­ting up Apple in Spain and Barcelona as well.
And you started work­ing for Apple. You worked there for quite a long time.
Yes, I worked for Apple close to 20 years, set­ting up in Spain. Then I took on more re­spon­si­bil­ity for Eu­ro­pean dis­tri­b­u­tion, and I be­came the dis­tri­b­u­tion man­ager for Ebay, where I worked for close to 20 years. After that I started my own busi­ness, for a cou­ple of years, and it didn't work out, as you have to be very trans­par­ent and very hon­est with your­self to make sure you don't con­tinue some­thing that doesn't work and that didn't work for me. I'm more of a guy who wants to work for multi­na­tion­als, and drive pro­jects for­ward.
Then, luck­ily, I got a phone call from an ex-em­ployee who said to me: ”Hey Fred, you know, I am work­ing for Ama­zon right now, would you like to join?” and I said: “Why not?” So the week after I met them in Lux­em­bourg, I had a cou­ple of in­ter­views there and a cou­ple months after I was hired, know­ing that we would set up Ama­zon here in Spain, but it was still too early. So, I first went to Ger­many for close to eight months, at the ful­fill­ment cen­tre there. Then we started look­ing for a place to start Ama­zon ful­fill­ment in Spain. Which of course is in Madrid. We started there in a ware­house, as a ful­fill­ment cen­tre, which after one year be­came too small.
Right now we are ex­tend­ing that one from 28,000 square me­tres to 35,000. But that's not enough. Ama­zon Spain has man­aged to be­come the fam­ily web­site por­tal to buy all sorts of things on­line. The de­mand never stops in­creas­ing, and so that's why we now need an­other cen­tre.
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