Warburg Pincus' Asian logistics sale can stack up at a discount. The private equity firm is planning a Hong Kong listing for ESR Group, a warehouse operator valued at roughly $4 billion. Fancy godowns are in short supply and e-commerce is booming across the region. Yet public markets have not favoured regional rivals like GLP, taken private in 2017. Some plain packaging will help this sale deliver.
ESR has a network of warehouses from Japan to Australia and India, which it leases out to online titans including Amazon, JD.com and Alibaba. Already, existing storage capacity across those countries is failing to keep up with local shopping habits. Roughly 80 million square feet of new industrial and logistics space is due to be completed in Asia Pacific this year, not enough to meet demand, according to CBRE. ESR's revenue jumped nearly 60 percent in the first three quarters of 2018, compared to the same period a year earlier, while earnings rose 7 percent, from a 2017 figure boosted by one-off gains.