In these Covid times, with demand shrinkages, GDP contraction, gloom and uncertainty everywhere in business and life in general, “we the warehouse infrastructure development sector categorized by government as infrastructure and by financial institutions as real estate”, have suddenly been labelled a coved positive sector!!

While this brings in lot of joy to a sector simply because the supply chain industry I firmly believe is the central nervous system of any country or organization. But until, about a couple of years ago, the warehouse development sector by all means has been under the shadow of its bigger siblings in real estate and supply chain. As a whole it was considered only as an enabling or a service function to the sales team within organizations, hence has been out of focus.

The importance of having a beefy, stress resistant and robust supply chain setup has been highlighted by the current pandemic crisis that the world is seeing. Having a rightly located warehouse with ease of reach to customer has brought about the choice and location of warehouses back in focus. I hope all the necessary lessons in terms of choice of assets and in terms of locations of assets in close proximity to customers have been learnt.

The rules of the game continues to be the same from the time I started of my journey back in 2007, only the clarity of thoughts have increased. When I reflect back upon the journey from godam (to be read in hindi) – to godown – to warehouse and now to logistics park it’s a remarkable progress in the last 12 years. With the amount of private equity capital hunger for this space, it only extenuates the fact that the time for warehousing as an asset class has truly come.

At FWS we were lucky enough to have done impactful development from the very beginning. With the first project back in 2007 which was the biggest development of its time then and still continues to enjoy best in industry rentals. On a personal front when I have seen this industry evolving, I have had the pleasure of working with some of the finest supply chain brains in the country, stalwarts in the industry, negotiate with some of the finest brains and most importantly have made great friends along the journey. and if anyone is interpreting this to be my retirement speech, well there is still time for that!!!

I sincerely want to thank all the incredible people whom I have had the pleasure of interacting during my time as leading Future Warehouse Solutions, my team that has been through the thick and thin with me and amazing colleagues.

Lastly I would like to spell out our ambition of the year and the coved challenge has only made us more resolute. We at FWS this year  plan to continue with our grow  journey and continue to do what we have been doing for the last 12 years and at the end of financial year 2020, we hope to add another 1.5 million square feet of leased assets to our portfolio.