Middle East’s warehouse developer to double investments in India

Investcorp Holdings BSC, the Middle East’s biggest alternative asset manager, is doubling down on warehouse investments in India, betting the nation’s manufacturing ambitions and e-commerce boom will fuel demand for logistics, said reports. Warehousing currently accounts for almost 16% of the Bahrain-based firm’s $350 million real estate portfolio in India, and it’s planning to boost that share in the coming year, according to Ritesh Vohra, the firm’s real estate head in the nation. “Warehouses could end up being our biggest strategy in Indian real estate,” he said in the reports. Investcorp joins a flood of international capital investing in a sector that’s been buoyed by the government’s plan to transform India into a manufacturing hub, and a steady rise in online shopping on platforms such as Walmart Inc.’s Flipkart and Amazon.com Inc. Institutional capital is flowing in,” said Vohra. “Warehousing is where office space was 7-8 years ago,” added reports. The company, whose Indian real estate portfolio is currently dominated by residential property, last year deployed $55 million to back Chennai-based developer NDR Warehousing Pvt. Ltd. That helped grow NDR’s stock of warehousing space to 14 million square feet from 9 million square feet.