GII acquires Amazon’s logistics center in Germany for $144m
Gulf Islamic Investments LLC (GII), a UAE based Islamic financial services company, announced the acquisition of nearly one million square feet of logistics centers for Amazon, on behalf of its investors, for $144 million. Rasmala acted as a strategic co-adviser and co-investor on this acquisition assisting on all aspects of the acquisition.
The two state-of-the-art Grade A logistics centers, which are located in Dortmund, Germany, serves as Amazon’s key logistics centers supplying goods to 29 other facilities.
These newly built facilities are leased out to Amazon on a longterm unbreakable lease with regular rental uplifts linked to Germany CPI.
Mohammed Al-Hassan, GII cofounder/CEO said: “GII’s real estate investment strategy is to have an exposure to good yielding commercial assets with investment grade tenants. We believe this transaction perfectly matches our investment strategy.”
“Dortmund offers a strategic location for a high-growth market and is one of the most important logistics hubs in whole Europe. Germany also produces about onequarter of the EU’s GDP, with investment safety rates and remarkable returns.”
Al-Hassan confirmed that GII plans to keep acquiring high quality income yielding real estate assets in the US, the UK and Germany, and to invest selectively in attractive value-add development opportunities in the GCC region.
Pankaj Gupta, the co-CEO of GII added: “The property marks the 5th international real estate asset acquired by GII in the last 2 years and the first in Germany. We see this transaction as an extremely suitable investment for our clients in these challenging investment environment as it not only gives a high single digit cash-on-cash yield but also very strong lease covenants with a marquee tenant like Amazon in a stable geography like Germany. The investment further establishes GII capabilities of providing whole value-chain services and hence offering best in class opportunities.
After this transaction, the total investment of GII in the European market crossed $500 million, while the value of the investment portfolio exceeded $1.3 billion.