India's warehousing leasing to touch 20 mn sq ft in 2018, says report

Robust leasing activity and government push will see demand for warehousing space in India reach 20 million square feet in 2018, according to '2018 Asia Pacific Real Estate Market Outlook - India' report. It has been published by CBRE South Asia, an India-based real estate consulting firm. This growth will be lead by third party logistics and e-commerce players. Benefits of government initiatives such as goods and services tax and grant of infrastructure status are set to provide further impetus and spur inflow of institutional capital. Further, the report says a unified tax regime is changing the dynamics of India’s logistics market. Smaller players are consolidating their operations while larger players are expanding their reach across key hubs. Also, warehousing and logistics players are increasingly adopting information technology solutions to handle inventory management. Usage of fleet management software, radio-frequency identification and automated pallet storage is growing quickly.

Blockchain deployments

Only 1 per cent of CIOs (chief information officers) indicate any kind of blockchain adoption within their organisations, and only 8 per cent of CIOs are in short-term planning or active experimentation with blockchain, according to Gartner’s 2018 CIO Survey. Among 293 CIOs of organisations that are in short-term planning or have already invested in blockchain initiatives, 23 per cent of CIOs say blockchain requires the most new skills to implement, while 18 per cent believe blockchain skills are the most difficult to find. A further 14 per cent indicate blockchain requires the greatest change in the culture of the IT department, and 13 per cent say the structure of the IT department has to change in order to implement blockchain. CIOs from telecom, insurance and financial services are more actively involved in blockchain planning than CIOs from other industries.