Sinziana Pardhan, Managing Director at P3 Logistic Parks, was one of the speakers at BR’s re:Focus on Retail and Logistics. In her first intervention of the day, she spoke about the latest trends in the industrial real-estate sector.

“We observed a tendency in the past 2-3 years, the regional distribution of logistics centers of big retailers. But it’s important to learn from what is happening in other countries, in Western Europe or event closer to us, in Poland for example. This trend is actually a result of the lack of infrastructure in Romania. But when our infrastructure will be more developed, we will see a reverse process towards consolidation into central warehouses, because it is more efficient to operate from a single central warehouse. We are still lagging behind in this regard, but we are just starting out, it will be interesting to see how thing will look in 5, 7 or 10 years from now.”

How P3 Logistic Parks views the Romanian market?

“We have a lot of confidence in the growth potential of Romania, of its GDP, its purchasing power, and its stock of industrial and logistic centers. The perspective is quite exciting for Romania if we look at the growth speed of logistic spaces, which were doubled in the past 10 years. We are still playing a catch-up game, but this only means there’s big growth potential.”

On eCommerce:

If we look at previous years, eCommerce was the main growth engine that changed the shape of the industrial and logistics area, from the least attractive real-estate sector to one of the most exciting ones, which attracts the most attention from investors. We can ask ourselves why this transition from traditional retail to eCommerce generated such a growth in the demand for warehousing spaces. The answer was given by several studies, which estimate that for every EUR 1 million of online sales, around 4.5 times more warehousing space is required, for the same amount of sales in traditional retail.”