ESR Group Limited (“ESR” or the “Company”, together with its subsidiaries, the “Group”; SEHK Stock Code: 1821), APAC’s largest real asset manager powered by the New Economy, today announced that its South Korean platform, ESR Kendall Square (hereinafter referred to as “ESRKS”), has established Korea’s first perpetual, open-ended core logistics fund.
The newly-formed core fund portfolio includes seven trophy assets which are developed and managed
by ESRKS.
Strategically located in the Greater Seoul and Greater Busan areas, the initial seven assets, with a total
Gross Floor Area (“GFA”) of 1 million sqm, have an average occupancy of over 99%. Built within the last
three and a half years on average, these assets are state-of-the-art, Class A logistics warehouses that
come with modern ESG features including rooftop solar power systems and EV charging stations for
forklifts to enable tenants to enhance operational efficiency. The tenant base of the core fund portfolio
primarily comprises major e-commerce and global third-party logistics (“3PL”) companies.
As an open-ended vehicle, the newly-formed core fund will have the opportunity to acquire high-quality
income producing stabilised assets from not only third-party entities, but also the extensive pipeline of
development assets managed by ESRKS. With its launch, ESR also now has fund structures in new
development, core-plus acquisitions and two complementary perpetual core vehicles with the ESR
Kendall Square REIT and the new core fund, both of which are first-of-its-kind in the market.
Jeffrey Shen and Stuart Gibson, ESR Group Co-founders and Co-CEOs, said: “ESR is delighted to lead the
way with the debut of our flagship open-ended logistics core fund in Korea. This further reinforces our
strong commitment to capital recycling and the desire to retain and manage our best-in-class assets and
strategic tenant relationships over the long term. We thank our existing and new core fund investors,
which include large global institutional investors, for their support. This achievement reinforces our
excellent full cycle development track record in Korea, as well as the compelling long-term income
potential of our market leading Korean logistics portfolio. We target to continue to bring in more highquality institutional investors as we further scale this new vehicle.”
Josh Daitch, ESR Group CIO, commented: “The establishment of the Korea Core Fund now adds to ESR’s
full range of investment products across the risk spectrum. This strategy matches product to investors’
risk tolerance and enables them to better access the compelling fundamentals of New Economy real
estate in Asia. From a Group perspective, we now have dedicated and sizable core vehicles in Australia,
China (both RMB and USD), Japan, Korea and Singapore with our inaugural ESR China REIT in process.”
Thomas Nam, CEO, ESR Korea, added: “We are proud to announce another milestone in successfully
establishing Korea’s first open-ended logistics core fund that will be managed perpetually. We expect
modern logistics facilities, such as those in our core fund portfolio, to be increasingly sought after as
they provide operational efficiencies for tenants. With this milestone, we believe that the seven trophy
assets will lay the foundations for a core vehicle that will deliver long-term sustainable growth for our
investors.”
ESRKS and its affiliates are together the largest logistics real estate manager in South Korea with an
estimated US$14 billion of assets under management (“AUM”) and an estimated 6 million sqm of GFA
to date.
