Brookfield Buys Mumbai-Area Data Centre Site for $81M and More Asia Real Estate Headlines

India leads today’s roundup of regional news headlines, with Canada’s Brookfield securing land near Mumbai for a data centre site, Singapore’s Xander upping its Chennai warehouse space, and Google Cloud announcing a new cloud region in Delhi NCR. China Evergrande also manages to keep itself in the headlines as it sells shares in a Shenyang bank to raise cash.

Brookfield Buys Mumbai-Area Data Centre Site for $81M

Canada’s Brookfield Infrastructure has bought a 30 acre (12 hectare) land parcel in Navi Mumbai, a satellite town of Mumbai, for INR 600 crore ($81 million) from K Raheja Corp, sources said.

Brookfield Infrastructure, which recently formed a joint venture with NYSE-listed Digital Realty for setting up and operating data centres in India under the brand BAM Digital Realty, plans to build a data centre on the site. Read more>>

Evergrande Raises $154M Selling Stake in Shenyang Bank

China Evergrande Group raised about one billion yuan (US$154 million) after paring its stake in Shengjing Bank Co., as the real estate conglomerate continues to downsize its sprawling empire to stave off a liquidity crisis.

Evergrande Nan Chang sold about 167 million shares in Shengjing Bank at 6 yuan apiece, the same as its purchase price in 2019, to two state-backed units of northeastern Shenyang city, the Chinese lender said in an exchange filing on Tuesday. It said its board would support key local state-owned enterprises to gradually increase their holdings in batches and “adjust the equity structure to become the bank of the government.” Read more>>

Xander Industrial Platform Buys 1M Sq Ft of Chennai Warehouse Space

Singapore-based Xander Investment Management’s industrial platform has acquired an additional 1 million square feet (92,903 square metres) of warehousing space in the Free Trade and Warehousing Zone at Sriperumbudur near Chennai.

Xander already owns 1 million square feet of warehouses in the FTWZ that were acquired over the last decade, and the new acquisition will double its ownership in the park to 2 million square feet. Read more>>

Google Cloud Launches 2nd India Cloud Region in Delhi NCR

Google Cloud India announced the launch of its new cloud region in Delhi NCR to further serve customers and the public sector in India and across Asia-Pacific. Designed to enable both Indian and global companies alike to build highly accessible applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is the second Google Cloud region in India and 10th in Asia Pacific.

“Our commitment to India is for India, by India,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “Because of this, we are not only seeing success in America, Europe but also Asia Pacific and we are seeing growth in the number of leading companies around the world.” Read more>>

Hong Kong Quarantine U-Turn Hits Battered Hotels Sector

The return of more stringent travel restrictions in Hong Kong is likely to weigh on the city’s battered hotels sector, which is expected to record among the slowest recoveries in Asia, analysts said.

In a U-turn on Monday, the Hong Kong government ended what could be the world’s shortest relaxation of quarantine rules and put the US and 14 other countries in a high-risk category for COVID-19. Arrivals from these countries will now be required to undergo a 21-day quarantine, rising from the seven-day period that was required just a week ago. The rules were tightened after the detection of the more infectious Delta variant in a 38-year-old woman who arrived from the US and underwent a seven-day quarantine. Read more>>

CapitaLand Deal Could Start Investment Manager Trend on SGX

Shareholders of CapitaLand have had plenty to cheer about over the last few months. The property group recently posted a net profit of S$922 million (now $677.6 million) for the first six months of 2021, putting it well on track to reversing its full-year loss in 2020.

The share price is up about 20 percent from where it last traded before the announcement of a major restructuring plan in March, closing at S$3.96 on Tuesday. Read more>>

South Korea’s SK REIT Eyes September Stock Market Debut

The real estate investment trust unit of SK Group, South Korea’s No.3 conglomerate, said Wednesday that it will carry out an initial public offering in September.

SK REIT said it will sell 46.5 million shares to investors in the planned IPO, whose specific date has yet to be unveiled. Read more>>

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