2020年经济学人 工业废弃地成为房地产巨头的新战场(1)（在线收听）

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The warehouse king

仓库之王

Why industrial wasteland is the new battltground for property giants

工业废弃地为何会成为房地产巨头的新战场

In the late 1990s Hamid Moghadam, an Iranian-born property developer, made a $5m bet on Webvan, an American online grocer. It was a bust. Webvan was one of the most spectacular casualties of the dotcom crash. More galling still, Mr Moghadam turned down the opportunity to invest in another e-commerce upstart called Amazon, thinking its focus on books was too narrow compared with groceries. Yet some people can win even by losing. Sensing a potential bounty in the online craze, the firm he cofounded, AMB, sold its portfolio of shopping centres and bought millions of square feet of warehouse space on the tarmac of American airports instead. "We got the company wrong, but we got the big trend right," he says. Two decades later the company he heads, Prologis, is Amazon's biggest landlord. Mr Moghadam, now 63, stands tall over the world's warehouse business.

20世纪90年代末，出生于伊朗的房地产开发商哈米德·穆加达姆以500万美元的价格押注于美国的网上杂货零售商Webvan。而这场赌注破产了。Webvan是泡沫崩溃中损失最惨重的公司之一。更令人恼火的是，穆加达姆拒绝了投资另外一家电子商务新贵Amazon的机会，他认为与杂货零售商相比，亚马逊对图书的关注相对狭隘。然而有些人能够反败为胜。他意识到了网络热潮中的潜在利益，所以他卖掉了自己创建的公司AMB的购物中心组合，转而在美国机场的停机坪上购买了数百万平方英尺的仓库空间。他说，“我们投资错了公司，但是我们准确地把握住了大趋势，”20年后，他领导的公司Prologis是亚马逊最大的业主。穆加达姆现在63岁了，他屹立在全球仓储业务之上。

A Stanford graduate who got his start in property because no one else in America would hire him during the Iranian revolution,Mr Moghadam has made a career of bold bets. In 2011, with property still reeling from the financial crisis of 2007-09, he led a bumper deal to unite AMB and Prologis, a bigger rival, with a combined $46bn of owned and managed assets. Since then the propertyinvestment firm has expanded globally. It has assets of $125bn and floor space of lbn square feet (90 square kilometres, or a Manhattan-and-a-half). A surge of e-commerce during the covid-19 pandemic has helped underpin its share price; its market value of $68bn is just below an all-time high. Yet Mr Moghadam is not alone in realising that the humble shed can be as good an investment in the e-commerce era as shovels were during the Gold Rush. Blackstone, the world's largest alternative-asset manager, invested more than $25bn last year in warehouses in America and Europe. It calls logistics its "highest-conviction global investment theme". A battle over industrial wasteland is underway.

穆加达姆作为一个斯坦福的毕业生，因为在伊朗革命期间，没有其他的美国人会雇用他，他就大胆地赌了一把并开始了自己的房地产生涯。在2011年，房地产业仍在2007-09年的金融危机的影响中挣扎，于是他主导了一场非常大的交易，他以自有资产和管理资产，共计460亿美元，将AMB与更大的竞争对手Prologis联合了起来。从那时起，这家房地产投资公司就在全球扩张。它的资产为1250亿美元，建筑面积为10亿平方英尺（90平方公里，相当于1.5个曼哈顿）。由于新冠肺炎疫情期间电子商务激增，帮助支撑了其股价；其市值680亿美元，略低于历史最高水平。然而并非只有穆加达姆一人意识到，在电子商务时代，简陋的棚屋可以像淘金热时期的铁锹一样成为一项不错的投资。世界最大的另类资产管理机构黑石，去年在美国和欧洲的仓库投资超过150亿美元。它将物流业称为“全球最具说服力的投资主题”。一场关于工业废弃地的战争正在进行。