From London to China to Northern California, our recent customer meetings – known internally as Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings – have been a melting pot of ideas, insights and innovations. These forums bring people together to solve supply chain challenges affecting businesses across industries and around the globe.
Groundbreaking Insights
Our customers are at the core of everything we do. At these events, we get a chance to hear from them directly about their biggest opportunities and most pressing challenges. Likewise, we share our global insights and discuss ways that Prologis solutions and teams can address their challenges.
In October, Prologis hosted its 2024 CAB Europe meeting in London as part of our annual thought leadership forum, GROUNDBREAKERS. Our CEO, Hamid Moghadam, joined the CAB meeting, as he often does.
We connected with a group of global customers on key industry trends and customer pain points. The meeting was time well spent learning from each other and discussing ways that the global supply chain is changing, driven in large part by evolving consumer expectations, behaviors and geopolitical trends.
We also recently hosted our annual 3PL Executive Roundtable – another version of our CAB forum – in California. This event brought together nearly a dozen executives from our largest 3PL customers, including Geodis, Ryder, Kuehne + Nagel, DSV, NFI and CJ Logistics, among others.
Here’s what we learned:
- 88% of attendees reported their businesses are “somewhat likely” or “extremely likely” to grow in 2025 with a cautious market outlook. This growth may not directly result in real estate footprint expansion, but it’s an indication of optimism going into 2025.
- AI and automation are transforming areas like demand forecasting, customer sentiment analysis and lease management. Some customers continue to evaluate utilization due to concerns around cost, ROI and complexity of implementation. For example, while AI tools like GPT have been rapidly adopted, other technologies, such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to automatically identify and track objects and people, are struggling to find viable use cases in warehouse environments.
- Momentum in deploying renewable energy and other sustainability solutions will continue – regardless of any U.S. federal policy changes.
Navigating Change
In November, I joined our team in China to meet with a group of our biggest customers at the 2024 Supply Chain Globalization & Cross-Border Collaboration Forum in Shenzhen. The event brought together 80 key executives from the manufacturing, cross-border e-commerce and new energy industries. The agenda included panel sessions featuring senior executives and industry experts discussing the current state and future of supply chains in China and other Asian markets.
I sat down with Eddie Huang, president of Greater China, Patrick Li, head of China operations, and Jiabin Wi, vice president of Customer Led Solutions for Prologis China, for a panel discussion on Prologis’ core values, principally customer-centricity and innovation. We also sat on panels with our customers, including Amazon, CATL, SF Express, DP World and Geodis, to share learnings of how all players are navigating the cyclical fluctuations in the Chinese market and continuing to develop in this dynamic environment.
In hosting this cross-border forum, we heard more and more about Chinese customers looking to set up or expand operations overseas. With a deeper understanding of the challenges our customers face in expanding their networks outside of their home market, we are efficiently tapping into our robust global land bank to provide spaces in consumption centers around the world. Leveraging these relationships along with our global portfolio, we recently closed a new lease of over 10,000 square meters in Europe for a Chinese customer, helping to solve a supply chain gap they had.
Building the Future
Customer-centricity is the cornerstone of the Prologis strategy and ethos. These CAB events reinforce that the strength of our future lies in partnership with our customers—large and small. We work hand in hand to face challenges, co-create solutions, seize opportunities and shape the future of logistics and real estate.
