Logistics Pro Jeffrey Schwartz Places All His Chips on Asia
The deputy chairman of Global Logistic Properties Holding is placing a big bet on Chinese consumers by expanding the company’s market-leading network of warehouse facilities. He’s doing something similar in Japan.
By Tom Buerkle
VIRTUALLY EVERY CEO SPENDS A GOOD DEAL OF his or her time thinking about China: how to penetrate the countrys vast market, whether to source more production there, how to fend off competition from Chinese rivals. Most executives would love to be plotting their strategy from the vantage point of Jeffrey Schwartz.
A veteran of the logistics industry, Schwartz, 53, has built Singapore-based Global Logistic Properties Holding into the leading operator of modern warehouse facilities in China. The company owns 6.5 million square meters (70 million square feet) of warehouse space in 29 cities across the Middle Kingdom twice as much as its eight largest competitors combined.
And Schwartz, who leads the company as deputy chairman and head of its executive committee, is just getting started. He figures on riding the wave of development thats spreading to Chinas vast interior from its coastal megalopolises. The company plans to grow its Chinese warehouse space by 30 percent this year, it owns land that will support an additional 2.5 million square meters of such space, and it has rights to a further 9 million square meters of developable land.
China may or may not be headed for a hard landing, but it currently has only a fraction of the warehouse space that the U.S. has. It will need plenty more as the economy shifts its focus from exports to domestic consumer demand, Schwartz contends. Among GLPs largest and fastest-growing clients in China are shipping company Shanghai Nice Talent Logistics Co. and Jingdong Corp., one....