工业废弃地成为房地产巨头的新战场(1)

Business Schumpeter
The warehouse king Why industrial wasteland is the new battltground for property giants
In the late 1990s Hamid Moghadam, an Iranian-born property developer, made a $5m bet on Webvan, an American online grocer. It was a bust.
Webvan was one of the most spectacular casualties of the dotcom crash. More alling sill, Mr Moghadam turned down the opportunity to invest in another e commerce upstart called Amazon, thinking its focus on books was too narrow compared with groceries.
Yet some people can win even by losing. Sensing a potential bounty in the online craze, the firm he cofounded, AMB, sold its portfolio of shopping centres and bought millions of square feet of warehouse space on the tarmac of American airports instead.
"We got the company wrong, but we got the big trend right," he says. Two decades later the company he heads, Prologis, is Amazon's biggest landlord.
Mr Moghadam, now 63, stands tall over the world's warehouse business. A Stanford graduate who got his start in property because no one else in America would hire him during the Iranian revolution, Mr Moghadam has made a career of bold 

In 2011, with property sill reling from the financial crisis of 2007 -o9, he led a bumper deal to unite AMB and Prologis, a bigger rival, with a combined $46bn of owned and managed assets. Since then the propertyinvestment firm has expanded globally
It has assets of $125bn and floor space of Ibn square feet (90 square kilometres, or a Manhattan and-a- half). A surge of e commerce during the covid-19 pandemic has helped underpin its share price; its market value of $68bn is just below an ll-time high.
Yet Mr Moghadam is not alone in realising that the humble shed can be as good an investment in the e commerce era as shovels were during the Gold Rush. Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, invested more than $2sbn

last year in warehouses in America and Europe.
It calls logistics its "highest. conviction global investment theme'". A battle over industrial wasteland is underway.