You must have seen that as the e-commerce industry is booming, there is a need for a lot of warehouses as well and the interesting thing is that warehouses can’t be centralized to a particular country such as China or Taiwan because of the fact that every country, state or city should have a warehouse so as to reduce the time taken for delivery as much as possible. In that case, everyone will need to have their warehouses in places around the world and this is true for every major company such as Amazon, Walmart and others.
Talking about warehouses, we have also seen that companies share their warehouses with others so as to reduce costs of acquiring land which is quite costly and also make sure that they don’t waste space. One such company is Investcorp which is betting big on Indian warehouse sector and it is middle east’s biggest alternative asset manager. Ritesh Vohra, Investcorp’s real estate head for India, said “Warehouses could end up being our biggest strategy in Indian real estate,”
“Institutional capital is flowing in,” said Vohra. “Warehousing is where office space was 7-8 years ago.” he added. India wants to become the next manufacturing hub and it is not possible to manufacture in bulk without providing space for warehouses where those products can be stored. Vivek Rathi, director of research for Knight Frank India, said “We are expecting record investments for warehousing this year,” and added that “So many global investors are enquiring about these assets.”
As companies around the world are diversifying their supply chain from China to a “China-plus-one” strategy, countries like India and Taiwan will benefit. Blackstone Inc. is also building a customized warehouse for Amazon in country’s capital Delhi. Apart from that, Blackstone currently owns about 42 million square feet of warehousing in India at the moment. It is interesting to note that Blackstone did not own any warehousing space in India before the Covid-19 pandemic. Gautam Kapoor, owner of Shiprocket Logistics, says “Our day jobs have become going out and searching for more warehouses”. He added that “The need for space is huge” in India right now.
