WDP Taking Stock - Business Focus Magazine

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TAKING STOCK

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WE LOOK AT HOW GLOBAL LOGISTICS REAL ESTATE SPECIALIST WDP HAS FOUND GROWTH IN ROMANIA.

TAKING

WDP first started out over 30 years ago in Belgium. The business purchased some old warehouses, renovated them, and rented them out. From there the idea started to grow.

STOCK

“O

ur founder was one of the first to renovate warehouses and rent them out,” says General Manager WDP Romania, Jeroen Biermans. “Then the next steps involved starting to expand into Northern France and The Netherlands.”

Since the company was founded in 1971 WDP has offered intelligent warehouse solutions that focus on the development and letting of semi-industrial and

PROJECT MANAGED BY: NEIL STOWE

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Jeroen Biermans General Manager WDP Romania

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Intelligent warehouse solutions Development and letting of semi-industrial and logistical real estate.

logistical real estate. WDP owns, develops and manages logistics and semi-industrial property with the business’s hallmark values and commitment driven by its family character. It’s a character that has led them to become the warehouse rental market leader in the Benelux region.

WDP today boasts over 4,500,000 square metres of warehouse space and has been listed on the Euronext stock exchange since 1999 in Brussels and since 2015 in Amsterdam.

Across all their sites WDP offers the full range of warehouse investments in line with the client’s activities.

“WE PROVIDE EVERYTHING. WE BUY THE LAND, WE TAKE CARE OF THE PERMITS, UTILITY CONNECTIONS, INFRASTRUCTURE, DESIGN AND ENGINEERING AND PROJECT DEVELOPMENT FROM START TILL FINISH: ONE STOP-ONE SHOP.”

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“We’re a one-stop-shop,” Biermans says. “We provide everything. We buy the land, we take care of the permits, utility connections, infrastructure, design and engineering and project development from start till finish: one stop-one shop. And after development, we manage the property and take care of it. We develop our warehouses by the means of renowned construction partners in coordination with our in-house project development team.

So we take over a lot of the worry and paperwork from the

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“IN THE BEGINNING, WE MOSTLY DEVELOPED FOR PRODUCTION COMPANIES SUPPLYING THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY, THEN SINCE TWO OR THREE YEARS, WE DEVELOPED MORE SITES FOR THE RETAIL SECTOR, RETAILERS ALSO PARTLY ACTIVE IN E-COMMERCE. WE NOW HAVE 20 DIFFERENT SITES & MORE THAN 50 CLIENTS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY.”

clients, including environmental impact assessments, and all the necessary documentation.”

WDP believes that through co-creation and intense collaboration it can help its customers’ operations move faster, smoother and cheaper, providing legal, finance, communications, project management, commercial profiles, and all other aspects of warehouse operations. It does this by drawing on the business’s specialists’ diverse experiences, perspectives and ideas. This team dedicates themselves to providing WDP’s customers with the perfect solution, offering nothing less than a bespoke answer to each and every problem. The tools that this team uses are critical problem solving, short local decision making and a focus on the total cost of logistical infrastructure ownership.

That is how WDP has

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developed the “dynamic warehouses” concept. Whether a customer is looking for a warehouse or distribution centre or wants to outsource its real estate to focus on core activities, WDP’s tailor-made approach allows for a traditional warehouse or cross-docking, pharmaceutical or cold storage facilities, a GDP or TAPA certified warehouse, a data warehouse or any other type of storage facility.

Every one of WDP’s warehouses and distribution centres is uniquely suited to the purpose.

The services WDP offers include the sale and rent-back operations, direct acquisitions, renovations, redevelopments, developments, assets with development potential over medium-long term, refurbishing existing buildings and innovative use for customers’ available space. WDP’s warehouses have a standard height of 10 meters or more, ensuring more efficient

stacking so that the available space is used to its maximum capacity, allowing customers to stack more goods in a smaller area.

A ROMANIAN SUCCESS STORY

The company’s main fields of operation are in Belgium, The Netherlands and North of France but one of its fastestgrowing and most exciting areas of trade is its new warehouses in Romania.

This might be considered surprising since WDP opened operating in this country at almost the same time the financial crisis hit in 2007. But where there were challenges, there were also opportunities.

“Just before the crisis in 2007 we teamed up for a venture in Romania” Biermans recalls.

“Then the financial crisis came and Romania was hit very hard as the local financial market

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dried up completely.”

As the crisis hit, many companies withdrew from markets that were no longer profitable, but this left room for businesses willing to stay the course.

“The crisis left Romania in a big hole for ten years and during that, we did work in green energy, a market stimulated by the EU,” Biermans says. “Then about four years ago the market picked up, WDP being one of

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the few investors in logistic and semi-industrial real estate that stayed, which was noticed by our clients. We kept our team and when the economy picked up, we could jump on the wave of those new opportunities.”

At the same time, WDP was also expanding into established and newly founded sectors.

“In the beginning, we mostly developed for production companies supplying the automotive industry, then

since two or three years, we developed more sites for the retail sector, retailers also partly active in e-commerce,” Biermans tells us. “We now have 20 different sites and more than 50 clients all over the country.”

The story of WDP in Romania is a true success story, showing how a company can succeed in growth by committing to a market it believes in.

It’s a journey that has brought challenges, as Biermans points out, “The greatest challenge is the paperwork, the administration. When we started in 2007 the challenge was mainly the paperwork for the acquisition of land. Now the greatest challenge is the paperwork regarding permits for the building, and connection to utilities because utilities have been privatised and the provider of the utility was never obliged to invest in the network.”

But at the same time, Romania

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offers a virtually untapped market and a huge pool of talent.

“The greatest opportunities are that when we started, Romania was basically a virgin market. A lot of new businesses, a lot of European and American companies are moving into Romania now but we have a local team and we were one of the first established there,” Biermans explains.

DRAWING ON LOCAL TALENT

The biggest problem when it comes to labour isn’t a lack of local talent, but in persuading that talent to stay in the country.

“Romania also has a big labour pool. The only problem is when I started there were 22 million people here and now there are only 17 because 5 million left to work abroad. So it gets harder to find a qualified labour force,” Biermans admits.

Fortunately, WDP has strong staff retention.

“We only have 80 people managing a portfolio of £5 billion in the entire WDP group.

WDP Romania counts 20 persons while just two persons have left since 2007, so we’re very stable,” Biermans tells us.

“Last year we moved into a new

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office, we invested in SAP, in digitalisation. It is demanding but once it is installed and managed it is very rewarding.

We have a flat structure if you’re involved in something, you’re in it to the end.”

Of course, businesses trying to take care of their staff have faced a new challenge this year in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, and no business has been able to avoid the safety and economic implications of the crisis.

selling point, but a social obligation as a leading property partner for the logistics sector.

How they do business can have a major impact on prosperity and the environment, and WDP is determined to make sure that impact is for the better. That is why sustainable entrepreneurship has been a key part of the WDP strategy for many years.

Using the Sustainable Development Goals (20162030) drawn up by the United Nations as their benchmark, WDP has worked hard to create a concrete working framework that focuses on seven key themes it has defined to help the company maintain sustainable employment practices and sustainable management for the future. From this framework, WDP is working towards a long-term roadmap to guide the future of the company. It has already concluded that the business can contribute towards several important sustainability goals, including the use of sustainable energy, employment and economic growth, and the battle against climate change, where WDP can have a direct or indirect influence.

The key to WDP’s social responsibility is the company’s recognition that its responsibility applies at the corporate level as well as the local level, and these two levels are entwined with each other in a way that cannot be separated. WDP’s corporate strategy on sustainable development implies futureproofing the company and its stakeholders.

WDP strongly believes that contributing to a more sustainable and better world is only possible when everyone within the company believes in this vision, and is supported in this respect by the management

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

WDP ensures its buildings are well-insulated and use sustainable and renewable energy. Combining that with careful consideration of how that energy can be used most efficiently, WDP is able to offer greener warehouses and distribution centres that are, consequently, a great deal cheaper. The company carefully monitors its customers’ utility costs and uses that data to calculate the cost savings that can be made for an existing warehouse by comparing its energy consumption, primarily lighting and heating. WDP considers this not just a unique

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and the Board of Directors.

Only then sustainability remains embedded in WDP’s DNA. Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility, WDP’s vision for the future holds its pure player strategy as a cornerstone of its plans. WDP has pursued this strategy consistently for decades, focussing clearly on investments in, the development of and long-term leasing of highgrade sustainable logistics and semi-industrial property.

The company has been steadily enlarging its property portfolio by developing storage and distribution facilities for its own account, based on client demand and requirements and in line with the highest industry standards. WDP will also continue to invest directly in high-quality existing sites with a view to long-term leasing.

This strategy is set to be applied globally, as well as in Romania.

“WDP received a loan from the world bank so that the Romanian activity can grow without any financing problems by a portfolio of 1 billion euros by the end of 2023,” Biermans says. “A lot of companies will have realised by now that it’s good to hold safety stock, not to have a break into the supply line during times of crises, to have more than one production site per product and to have a minimum level of automation to cover lack of active labour force.

But even with all these plans ahead of them, Biermans still believes Romania has a great deal of untapped potential.

“There are still a lot of opportunities in Romania with infrastructure being built now. A lot of the country is not open because there are no highways and in case some of the 5 Million Romanian expats return to their home country it will boost local production and consumption” he says.

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