Warburg Pincus establishes Vietnam infrastructure platform

The joint venture, known as BW Industrial Development (BWID), will focus on meeting local demand for warehousing and build-to-suit and ready-built factories. It aims to leverage rapid growth in areas such as manufacturing-processing – an industry said to account for 40% of the record $36 billion of foreign direct investment received by Vietnam last year.

"With the transformative shift of the manufacturing base from markets like China to Vietnam as well as with the rapid rise of domestic consumption, the logistics and industrial real estate market in Vietnam is in the ‘early innings’ and at an inflection point for outsized growth,” Jeffrey Perlman, managing director and head of Southeast Asia at Warburg Pincus, said in a statement.

Warburg Pincus has been active in Vietnam since 2013 when it participated in a $200 million investment in shopping mall operator Vincom Retail, which recently completed the country’s largest-ever IPO to raise VND16.8 trillion ($740 million). Its latest investment is expected to leverage a number of existing Becamex partnerships, including Singapore’ Sembcorp, which manages a major industrial park development platform in Vietnam.

BWID extends a string of similar moves by Warburg Pincus whereby partnerships with credentialed logistics players across various Asian sub-regions have sought to establish locally informed expansion programs. This activity includes a number of investments in the Indian logistics space and D&J China, an industrial park developer.

The GP also seeded Chinese warehousing operator E-Shang, which subsequently merged with Singapore-headquartered counterpart Redwood Group. The resulting entity, E-Shang Redwood, has been called the largest pure-play pan-Asian logistics warehouse company with more than $12 billion in assets under management. It has gone on to receive substantial subsequent funding, including a $334 million commitment last year from Korea’s SK Group.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Industrials
• Infrastructure
• Real estate
• GPs
• Vietnam
• Warburg Pincus Asia
• Logistics
• manufacturing
• M&A