Some 300 million extra square feet of warehouse space needed in Europe to support e-commerce boom
Nearly 300 million square feet’s worth of warehouse space in Europe will need to be found to cope with the e-commerce boom expected in the coming years.
E-commerce sales across Europe are expected to increase by $298bn from 2020 to 2025, requiring thousands more industrial warehouses and distribution spaces to meet the growing demand, according to figures from the CBRE.
Jack Cox, managing director of EMEA industrial and logistics at CBRE, said e-commerce had grown steadily over the years, but the pandemic had accelerated online spending habits.
“This will continue to place significant importance on distribution and supply chain networks, as well as support record performance of logistics properties,” he added.
Every additional $1bn of global e-commerce sales globally requires one million square feet of distribution space, CBRE estimated.
With global e-commerce sales expected to increase by $1.5 trillion in the next five years, 1.5 billion square feet of e-commerce-related logistics space will be needed, with 298 million of that to be found in Europe.
The UK is one of the largest e-commerce markets in the world, and is expected to have a market penetration of 32 per cent by 2025.
The Netherlands and the Czech Republic are also expected to see high penetration in the next four years of 26 and 20 per cent respectively.
South Korean will see the world’s highest e-commerce penetration by 2025, at 43 per cent.
Tasos Vezyridis, head of industrial and logistics and retail research at the CBRE, added: “The European market is relatively polarised in terms of e-commerce penetration.
“There are a number of markets, including the UK, Germany, Sweden and The Netherlands which have many of the drivers already in place to facilitate high levels of e-commerce and this was accelerated during the pandemic.
“However, we believe many of the less established markets such as Portugal, Italy and Spain will see higher growth over the next five years and will start to catch up with the already dominant nations, resulting in growing demand for Logistics space in these markets and across Europe.”