Logistics real estate titan Prologis Inc. (NYSE:PLD) said Thursday that it has named Dan Letter to the newly created post of global head of capital deployment, a move that reflects the growing complexity of the company’s business and its unconventional organizational reporting style.
Letter, who assumed the role on Jan. 1, takes on a large part of Prologis’ chief investment officer’s responsibilities. Letter will report to Eugene F. Reilly, the company’s current CIO. Reilly and Letter will continue to collaborate on investment projects. However, Reilly will devote more of his time to supervising all of the company’s regional presidents across a 19-country network. Unlike most companies where the regional heads report to the CEO, the Prologis’ regional chiefs have a solid line to Reilly, not to Chairman and CEO Hamid R. Moghadam.
The new role also underscores the need to devote “more horsepower” to the investment side of Prologis’ business, according to Reilly. As Prologis’ business becomes more complex and far-flung, the financial and operating demands on the company have dramatically escalated, Reilly said. This was especially true in 2020 as companies sought out more logistics real estate to support surging e-commerce growth.
For example, Prologis plans to move more aggressively into urban fulfillment through its Urban Last Touch program, which has about 100 transactions under its belt in the past two to three years. Those projects, which typically involve repurposing an aging structure into a final-mile fulfillment facility to serve densely populated urban areas, are expensive and intricate to execute. Managing those types of projects require more intellectual bandwidth, Reilly said.
In 2020, Prologis completed $25 billion of investment activity. Of that, $17 billion was earmarked for mergers and acquisitions, it said.
In 2004, Letter joined developer AMB Property Corp., which seven years later acquired Prologis in an $8.7 billion deal that brought together $46 billion of assets under management. Prologis today is the world’s largest owner, developer and manager of logistics real estate, with 976 million square feet under operation.