Prologis, Inc. (NYSE:PLD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Blaine Heck with Wells Fargo. Please state your question.

Blaine Heck: Great. Thanks. So related to that last question, and Hamid, your comments on that progress towards equilibrium inventory, can you just talk about your recent conversations with customers? What’s your sense for how they are balancing this investment need and CapEx spend against concerns about the economic slowdown or recession and higher overall cost of capital?

Hamid Moghadam: Yeah. I will pitch it to Mike for more detailed comments on this. So my sense is that customers are — don’t have quite as much fomo as they did before. In other words, they are not in the hard mentality of let’s go get this place, because if we don’t, somebody else will and all that. I think the market has rationalized with respect to pace of leasing demand and people are being more thoughtful about how they go about their thinking space, because forget about what they pay us in rent. I mean every time you open a new large warehouse, there’s a lot of CapEx that goes into it and all that, real estate is the least of your worries. It’s all the other stuff that you have to put in. So I think people are cautious, but they also realize, particularly on the e-comm side that this was a theoretical threat before the COVID.

Now they see what really happened to their business during COVID. So they are very anxious to build out their full e-commerce supply chain, which is oftentimes a different one than their bricks-and-mortar supply chain. So I would say, demand has broadened, it’s much less all about Amazon, it’s much broader than that. But it’s pretty strong. Is it the strongest it’s ever been? No, it’s not as strong as 2021. But compared to any 10-year period you want to look at, it’s — we would consider this a very strong market. Mike?

Mike Curless: Yeah. I would just to pile on. I mean, on a net basis, the activity is still very strong, decision time line is definitely have stretched out of people to be more cautious. But remember, these structural configurations we have been talking about for two year or three years continue to march on, perhaps, at a bit of a slower rate, but ultimately, it comes down to the fear of not having the right space when you needed to hear from now is overwriting, taking space that’s a little bit too early. So broadly we feel pretty good about this overall activity.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from Craig Mailman with Citi. Please state your question.

Craig Mailman: Hey, guys. I just want to follow up on these demand discussions, because this is a constant question I get from clients here and maybe it’s more of a Chris question, but Hamid feel free to jump in, too. Just in terms of in these era of low vacancies were really not in the least, so net absorption is not necessarily the best leading indicator of demand. I mean what are you guys using at least to kind of use as your forward-looking indicator on and destruction or something that the market could look to, because it just seems like retentions are still high, availability is low, construction could fall off, but everyone is talking about inventories big higher, utilization will be higher, so people needing less of the space, but it’s just from your commentary, it seems like this is not really filtering through what you guys are seeing and just some thoughts there.

Then related to that, Chris, I mean, what would it take for market rents to actually turn negative, because that’s a question I get a lot as well and I am just kind of curious in your modeling kind of what inputs with that to really turn to get that from the positive 10% you are seeing to somewhere below zero?

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