Uber has announced plans to develop its business service centre in Krakow, Poland, as well as adding a facility to produce electric bikes for its Jump service. The total value of the investment is 37 million zloty (8.62 million euros)
Jamie Heywood, Uber’s CEO for North-Eastern Europe, made the announcement at an event in the Polish capital Warsaw organised by the Polish Ministry of Digitisation.
“Poland is an extremely important market for Uber and it is here, in Warsaw, that we want to have an office that will be a hub for the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe,” said Mr Heywood.
Uber bought Jump – an American company that specialises in electric bikes – in 2018. As part of the company’s global expansion strategy, it will soon begin rolling out an electric bike-sharing service in Europe, with the bikes being designed and built in Krakow.
“Uber will develop their first engineering centre outside of the US, in Krakow. The whole concept will be created in Poland using Polish engineering,” said Marek Zagórski, minister of digitisation.
“We are very happy that Uber is investing in Poland, first of all in young Polish engineers, in those who, thanks to these projects, will create modern transport technologies that allow secure communication,” added Andrzej Adamczyk, Poland’s minister of infrastructure, who also said that he hoped such investment would see more talented Polish engineers finding work at home.
The centre to be developed in Krakow will hire engineers and programmers to develop and integrate Jump’s electric bikes with the Uber application. In addition, they will develop other solutions for the Jump service to be applied globally. It will be the first Uber centre of its kind outside of the United States (the other two are in San Francisco and New York).
Uber currently employs 300 people in Krakow and intends to increase that to 500 by the end of 2019.
Uber’s office in Warsaw meantime will become the company’s main business centre for Central and Eastern Europe, responsible for the development of the Uber and Uber Eats platforms on all markets in the geographical region.
