GLP

GLP is an investor, developer and manager of logistics real estate and new-economy infrastructure, with a business covering the investment, development and operation of logistics real estate such as industrial warehouses. Its China business originally belonged to the American logistics real estate company ProLogis, which entered the Chinese market in 2003; after ProLogis sold its China and Japan businesses to GIC Real Estate, the Singapore government’s real estate investment company, at the end of 2008, the businesses were run by a management team including Ming Mei and subsequently developed into the independent GLP. According to Jia Yuantao, deputy director of industrial logistics leasing at Ping An Real Estate (who had previously worked at GLP), speaking to the Economic Observer, before foreign companies such as GLP entered China there was no concept of high-standard logistics in the country. According to Cushman & Wakefield data, GLP’s market share among China’s major logistics real estate companies reached 55%.

In December 2008, ProLogis announced that it would sell its wholly owned company in China and its 20% stake in its Japanese joint venture for US$1.3 billion to GIC Real Estate (GICRE, which manages the Singapore government’s overseas assets); the transaction was in cash and included all of ProLogis China’s debt. According to Ming Mei, then CEO of ProLogis Asia, as a result of the financial crisis the parent company’s total loan ratio had reached 58%, and after completion of the deal ProLogis would not only be able to absorb its debt in China but would also have more than 1 billion in cash to offset loans. The acquired assets were placed under the full operation and management of SMG Fund Management Co., Ltd., a fund jointly capitalised by GIC Real Estate, former ProLogis chairman and global CEO Jeffrey Schwartz, Ming Mei and the senior management teams of ProLogis China and Japan. Prior to this sale, the acquisition fund of ProLogis and GIC Real Estate had already spent 1.5 billion yuan to acquire a 50% stake in two specialised companies under Suzhou Industrial Park Housing Development Group Co., Ltd., obtaining 670,000 square metres of industrial and logistics facilities in the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park.

In China, GLP seized the opportunity presented by expanding e-commerce warehousing demand. In February 2012, GLP announced that it was leasing a 91,000-square-metre operations centre in Tianjin to a world-leading e-commerce retailer, which also signed two other lease agreements with GLP covering a combined 21,000 square metres of facilities at GLP Jifa Shenxi Logistics Park and GLP Suzhou Logistics Park; according to the Economic Observer, this retailer was Amazon. Vipshop had leased more than 20,000 square metres of warehouse space at GLP Park Guangzhou Nanhai since October 2010, and in July 2011 its South China logistics centre at the park was expanded to 30,000 square metres; in the same year Vipshop signed an investment cooperation agreement with Dianshanhu Town in Kunshan to establish an East China logistics centre at a GLP logistics park, with a warehouse occupying more than 20,000 square metres. Online retailer ihush also leased 24,400 square metres of logistics facilities at GLP Kunshan Logistics Park at the end of 2011 as a regional distribution centre. Yang Chuande, managing director of GLP China, said that as more and more companies moved their operations centres out of Beijing to cut costs, obtaining large-scale logistics facility space was becoming increasingly difficult. According to GLP’s annual report, in 2011 it had expanded to Xiamen and had projects in 20 Chinese cities, including projects in cities not close to ports such as Chengdu and Chongqing.

In December 2014, GLP acquired US industrial real estate totalling 117 million square feet from IndCor, an industrial real estate company wholly owned by Blackstone, for US$8.1 billion, thereby formally entering the US market; GLP then set up the GLP US Income Partners I fund jointly with GIC to operate these assets. GLP subsequently set up the second and third funds in the same series and continued making acquisitions, the larger of which was the acquisition of 57.9 million square feet of industrial real estate by the second fund for US$4.5 billion in November 2015; China Life was also one of the LPs of that fund. According to an Economic Observer report in June 2019, GLP held about 185 million square feet of logistics real estate in the United States through these three funds, and its 2017 annual report showed that its stake in the three funds was about 10%. According to the Economic Observer, the operating performance of GLP’s US properties supported the appreciation of the assets: in 2014 the occupancy rate of IndCor’s industrial properties was about 90%, while GLP’s 2017 annual report showed that the occupancy rate of its US properties had reached 94%; net operating income from the US properties grew 7% and 4% year on year in 2016 and 2017 respectively. In both 2016 and 2017, GLP’s largest customer in the United States was the e-commerce platform Amazon, whose share rose from 2.3% in 2016 to 4.5% in 2017.

On July 14, 2017, a Chinese consortium made up of Vanke, Ming Mei, Hopu Investment, Hillhouse Capital and Bank of China Group Investment issued a joint announcement with GLP stating that the consortium and GLP’s board had reached agreement on the full privatisation of the Singapore-listed company: the acquisition price was S$3.38 per share (about 16.67 yuan), with total consideration of about S$15.9 billion (about 78.441 billion yuan); once the privatisation was completed, Vanke would become GLP’s largest shareholder with a 21.4% investment share. According to Caixin, Vanke contributed S$3.4 billion to the acquisition. According to an Economic Observer report in November 2017, Zhang Xu, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Vanke Group, said that Vanke was joining hands with GLP to build the world’s largest logistics real estate platform; he revealed that as of early November that year Vanke’s own logistics and warehousing space was about 5 million square metres, and that with GLP’s scale added, the Vanke-related logistics footprint would expand to nearly 60 million square metres, covering more than 500 modern logistics parks and more than 800 quality customers, with a 60% share of China’s logistics industry. In January 2018, GLP formally announced the completion of its privatisation, with Vanke becoming GLP’s single largest holder with an equity interest of about 21.4%.

On January 31, 2018, the first science and innovation park in Beijing of Huanpu, GLP’s science and innovation park brand, completed its first phase and held a handover ceremony; this phase is the BMW Beijing R&D centre, and attendees included GLP co-founder and CEO Ming Mei and Zhao Mingqi, managing director of GLP China and head of the industrial and mixed-use development business platform, among others. The Beijing Huanpu Science and Innovation Industrial Park is located in the Shunyi Airport Economic Zone; it covers 114 mu, with a total development of 196,000 square metres, including 15,000 square metres of supporting commercial space, and is primarily positioned for high-end R&D and headquarters offices. The 26,000-square-metre first phase serves as BMW China’s R&D centre and consists of a 9,000-square-metre office building, an 8,000-square-metre R&D testing workshop and a 9,000-square-metre enclosed parking building, and 400 foreign engineers from the BMW Group were to work there in future. The park was a project Huanpu obtained through acquisition: in December 2014, GLP’s CLH(86)Pe.Ltd and Beijing Jiafengda Asset Management Co., Ltd. took stakes in the project company, and after Jiafengda exited in December 2016, GLP held 88% of the project company and Jiangxi Province Jingxi Industry and Trade held 12%. Since launching the brand in 2011, Huanpu has laid out nearly 20 science and innovation park projects across the country, in cities including Suzhou, Xi’an, Shaoxing, Dalian, Beijing, Shenyang, Tianjin, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Wuxi and Shanghai; its parks fall mainly into three types: smart manufacturing industrial parks, science and technology R&D industrial parks, and urban renewal industrial complexes. The Suzhou Jianwu Industrial Park is representative of Huanpu’s smart manufacturing industrial parks; as of early 2018 it had 141 resident companies, 20 of them with registered capital of more than US$10 million, bringing the locality 2 billion yuan in tax revenue and 30,000 jobs. The Xi’an Huanpu Science and Technology Park is a science and technology R&D industrial park with a total development of 550,000 square metres, and at the time its first phase already housed 50 companies and 15,000 people. GLP’s business consists mainly of four platforms: logistics, Huanpu industrial investment, financial holdings and equity investment, with Huanpu industrial investment focusing on the investment and development of integrated industrial parks. As of early 2018, GLP’s footprint in China covered 38 cities and 257 parks of various kinds, with a total floor area of 29.6 million square metres. In 2017, GLP signed an agreement with Ping An Real Estate under which all of the latter’s industrial logistics projects would in future cooperate with GLP across the board, in forms including but not limited to custodianship, acquisition and mergers.

On June 3, 2019, Blackstone disclosed plans to spend US$18.7 billion to acquire part of GLP’s US industrial warehouse network and debt, covering a total warehouse area of 179 million square feet (about 16.6 million square metres). According to the Economic Observer, the transaction was completed by two Blackstone funds, with the BREP strategy fund acquiring 115 million square feet for US$13.4 billion and the non-listed real estate investment trust BREIT acquiring 64 million square feet for US$5.3 billion; international logistics infrastructure providers such as Prologis also took part in the bidding, with Blackstone ultimately prevailing. A person close to GLP told the Economic Observer that a considerable proportion of the assets sold were those acquired from IndCor in 2014, at a total cost of more than US$9 billion. GLP replied to the Economic Observer that the assets sold came from its three US funds, that after the sale GLP would still hold 8 million square feet of assets in the United States and had not exited the US market, and that it would continue to carry out business related to logistics technology and operations. According to the Economic Observer, logistics expert Zhao Xiaomin, CEO of Guanshuo Enterprise, said the industry had generally predicted a transaction price of around US$16 billion, and the actual price was nearly US$2 billion higher; he believed GLP’s sale of its US assets was related to a shift of its strategic focus to the Asia-Pacific region and a strengthening of its financial thinking, while Blackstone had also been attaching increasing importance to logistics real estate in recent years. According to an Economic Observer report in August 2017, GLP’s share of China’s industrial logistics market remained in an absolutely leading position, and Ping An had made GLP its target to catch up with, often siting its logistics bases near GLP’s logistics bases, with many of its front-line employees coming from GLP; a person close to GLP commented that GLP, as a foreign company, did things in a standardised way but lacked vitality and reacted too slowly, and had to change itself.

In 2016, GLP set up its China asset service and operation platform ASP; as one of the group’s business platforms, it is responsible for the “management” link in the business chain of “fundraising, investment, management (and creation), and exit”. Centred on park scenarios, ASP provides management services across the full asset life cycle, covering stages such as planning and design, construction engineering, operation management, leasing, and products and value-added services, and uses the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, robotics and big data technologies to improve operating efficiency and service levels and drive the digital and intelligent upgrading of assets. As of 2021, this logistics and industrial facility management service platform managed more than 500 parks with an area of over 40 million square metres, serving more than 3,000 customers. ASP chairman and CEO Mo Zhiming previously served as co-president of GLP Assets China. On May 31, 2021, China issued its first batch of public infrastructure REITs, among which the CICC GLP REIT was the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s first public infrastructure REIT in the warehousing and logistics category, and it was listed on June 21. As an alternative asset investment manager, GLP has assets under management in China of US$72 billion, covering more than 400 facilities across 68 regional markets, including logistics and warehousing, manufacturing and R&D, data centres and new energy infrastructure, all invested in, developed and managed by it. Mo Zhiming said that REITs open up funding channels and direct capital towards infrastructure development, and that GLP, as the external manager of REIT assets, is committed to continuously raising the standard of asset operation and management; GLP’s participation in REITs aims to increase the speed of capital turnover and expand the room for the industry.

Ming Mei is the co-founder and CEO of GLP, and also the founder and CEO of the alternative asset management company GLP Capital Partners (GCP). According to the company, GLP focuses on three major areas, supply chain, big data and new energy, with global assets under management of US$80 billion; GLP began laying out data centres in 2018 and has developed new energy businesses including photovoltaics, wind power and energy storage.

Regarding customer industries, Mo Zhiming said that GLP has always paid close attention to the life sciences industry, that each of the five or six major industries it focuses on is served by a dedicated team, and that it maintains cooperation with leading Chinese and foreign companies in the broader health sector. Over the past few years, sales channels for life sciences have opened up, related to new retail, and the whole industry has become more connected with e-commerce. GLP has built many customised warehouses for the medical industry, and recently provided the domestic operations centre of a world-leading biopharmaceutical company with a one-stop “move-in ready” warehousing lease. The industry has strict requirements for leased warehousing, which must meet ISO9001/pharmaceutical GMP certification standards and requires ordinary ambient-temperature warehouses to be converted into multi-temperature-zone warehouses; in addition, the company wanted to switch to a long-term lease with monthly rent payments so as to avoid tying up a large sum of money at once. The solution GLP tailored for it covered an operating lease for 3,500 pallet positions, functional design and engineering retrofit of a multi-temperature-zone warehouse ranging from minus 25°C to plus 25°C, the provision of matching automated equipment, and embedded digital supply chain finance. The case involved an area of five or six thousand square metres, and the solution was more flexible because the customer faced more sales channels and wanted efficient distribution like e-commerce, with many sorting lines and different temperature zones inside the warehouse. In the past, life sciences companies all wanted to do it themselves, being uneasy about and not wanting others to know how they did it; now everyone is more open, so GLP provides a move-in-ready solution and the companies only need to manage their channels and drugs. Demand in the automotive industry is also changing: components for new energy vehicles are getting smaller and more delivery centres are needed, and some customers use warehouses as vehicle delivery centres where consumers can pick up cars at GLP warehouses; several parks in Xi’an already provide this service.

In terms of park operations, in response to pain points such as high labour costs for merchants’ warehousing and sorting during Double 11 and large swings in sorting volumes between peaks and troughs, ASP launched an integrated “warehouse + RaaS (robotics as a service)” solution for key industries such as footwear and apparel, fashion, e-commerce, cold chain and express delivery, allowing companies renting warehouses short-term during Double 11 to deploy flexible automated warehousing operations in one stop. For example, Biaopu GRS, a smart warehousing and sorting RaaS solution provider formed through cooperation between GLP and Zhejiang Libiao Robotics, launched the Li & Fung Victoria’s Secret RaaS project on August 14, using an operating model of free installation and per-piece charging, under which automated sorting equipment could be deployed within two to three weeks, so that the customer both saved the evaluation time needed for equipment selection and did not need to make an upfront one-off investment; after Double 11, companies can choose flexible configuration options without having to hold all the heavy assets of automated equipment long term. In addition, during Double 11 vehicles and personnel increase sharply for a short period, with several thousand extra people at each park, and the behind-the-scenes operational work such as toilet use and round-the-clock power and water supply is all handled by the ASP team. In terms of risk prevention and control, Mo Zhiming said that meteorological disasters are occurring with increasing frequency, and for the logistics industry, prevention is more important than responding after the event. According to Mo Zhiming in 2021, GLP had begun trialling a cloud-based meteorological disaster early-warning system connected to the website of the China Meteorological Administration a year earlier; once a warning is triggered, ASP’s park information management system (AMS) automatically dispatches work orders to each park, prompting them to promptly clear rooftops and unblock pipes, thereby reducing the impact of extreme flooding on park operations. AMS came into full use in 2021, and GLP describes the system as the first in the industry. During the epidemic, GLP used the system to track people and vehicles entering and leaving its parks and persisted with disinfection, maintaining park operations while ensuring epidemic prevention and control; according to the company, apart from the Wuhan park, whose operations were significantly affected in the early stage of the epidemic, all other parks were able to continue operating.

In 2025, Midea, COSCO SHIPPING Holdings and GLP reached a three-way strategic cooperation agreement, planning to jointly build a green smart supply chain delivery centre in Thailand, with the aim of making it a benchmark supply chain hub for the Southeast Asian region and driving the supply chain towards intelligent, low-carbon and efficient operation. According to Caixin, Vanke had listed its stake in the GLP group, together with VX Logistics and its ice and snow business, as non-core business assets it planned to step up efforts to transfer, with the aim of recouping 50 billion yuan, but this preliminary debt-resolution plan ultimately failed to materialise.