Prologis launches bid to snap up Blackstone’s €21bn warehouse portfolio
The world’s biggest warehouse owner Prologis has made a bid to snap up the warehouse portfolio of investment giant Blackstone, as firms scramble to secure logistics capacity and investment continues to pour into the space.
Prologis has made a non-binding offer of over €21bn for Blackstone’s 2000-strong European warehouse portfolio, Mileway, which the firm has been building up via acquisitions for the last six year, React News first reported.
Bosses at Prologis now have around six weeks to finalise a bid, according to sources cited by the FT.
The bid from Prologis comes as firms scramble for warehousing and logistics capacity after supply chains were stretched to breaking point by the pandemic, with the shocks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now compounding the disruption.
Investment into UK warehousing and logistics hit record levels in 2021, with over £17bn of deals completed in 2021 and the final quarter alone attracting as much investment as an average calendar year at £6bn, according to data from commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.
Figures from Savills similarly found that £10.8bn was poured into the UK logistics market in Q3 alone, beating the £10.2bn spent in the whole of 2020.
Prologis has felt the lift of the surge in demand for warehousing and its shares are trading up 60 per cent on pre-pandemic levels.