Casagrand, Blackstone to co-develop 4.2 mn sqft industrial, warehousing park with Rs 700-cr investment

Casagrand has pre-leased part of the development to Eicher Motors

IPO-bound real estate developer Casagrand's warehousing and industrial parks division has announced a strategic co-development deal with private equity major Blackstone for two industrial and logistics parks at Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, spanning 4.2 million square feet on a 154 acre land parcel. Blackstone is expected to invest around Rs 700 crore towards building the facilities, expected to be ready for operations in around 30 months.

Arun MN, Casagrand's chairman and managing director, said in an interaction with Moneycontrol that the facilities will also be aimed towards pure-play manufacturing clients, such as electronics manufacturers, and automobile players besides logistics-related end-uses. Casagrand counts iPhone manufacturer Pegatron as one of its clients, which has leased 500,000 sq ft from the developer, also in Chennai.

Arun added that its partnership with Blackstone is related to its plan to scale up its logistics offerings, in a bid to bring in around 10-15 percent of group revenue from that segment.

"Industrial warehousing is something we've been operating for the last 7-8 years and we've already developed close to about 5.5 million square feet. A lot of these assets have been sold to houses like CapitaLand and Logos. The strategy in the last three, four years has been to evolve and retain the yielding assets. We realised that we needed a long-term participant for our ventures...and who else is a better player than Blackstone," said Arun.

He added, "Partnering with them will add more credence because of value addition which Blackstone would bring in primarily not only in terms of the capital infused, but also in terms of strategic inputs, initiatives, advisors, thoughts, ideas which we can use them as a complementary strength with us".

Blackstone did not comment on the deal.

Part of the facilities to be built have already received pre-leasing commitments, with automobile giant Eicher Motors slated to use around 400,000 square feet as an auto spare parts consolidation facility for its Royal Enfield brand of premium motorcycles.