Prologis, Inc. (PLD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for the presentation of Prologis. My name is [ Dave Rodgers ], I'm a senior REIT analyst here with Raymond James. And happy to introduce Prologis' CFO, Tim Arndt; and Director of Investor Relations, Abhishek Kastiya in the audience as well, and they'll be available for the breakout session afterwards. But I want to turn it over to Tim for a presentation, and I'll jump back in with Q&A later. But Tim, thanks for being here.

Yes. Thanks, Dave, and good morning, everybody. Very happy to be here. We love this conference. As Dave mentioned, I'm the CFO of Prologis. I've been with the company for little over 20 years at this point, so seen a lot of the evolution of our space. And I can tell you, the company is at a very exciting point right now. Just to describe the company in a bit, we are the world's largest logistics REIT. We have 1.3 billion square feet of distribution and warehouse facility around the globe. We're situated in 20 countries. And we find ourselves at a point now where we've become very critical to both logistics infrastructure, but also increasingly around digital infrastructure, which is to say data centers, and we'll talk about the value creation opportunity we see in that business. But both of them also combining and creating a very interesting opportunity around energy. And in the data center business, energy is very thematic and critical, but it's also in logistics. And I'll talk a little bit about the ways that we're participating in that value creation and providing solutions to our customers. Just a snapshot of the company. We're a very large owner of real estate. We have about $240 billion of AUM today. About $170 billion of that is on our own balance sheet is in our enterprise value. The difference that $70 billion is in third-party equity capital in an asset management business we refer to as our strategic capital business. I'll talk a little bit about that. But when you look at our footprint, you can see we cover a major part of the global economy. We estimate that about 3% of global GDP passes through a Prologis facility. So we have an incredible footprint to leverage the growth of all of these businesses off of. If you think about like, well, who are we serving, just a snapshot of the kinds of customers in our logistics business that are in our rent roll. Our largest customer is in Amazon, so you're going to think about them as about 5% of our rent roll. In our view, I think we believe we are their largest landlord on the flip side, but a very diversified footprint of customers. And we think of demand in our portfolio as really stemming from 3 broad areas. The first is just around consumer spending, basic daily needs, food and beverage, apparel, small electronics, et cetera. That probably drives about 40% of our leasing volume. Also the associated transportation and third-party logistics providers that serve those businesses. The next segment would be more around secular drivers of demand that would deal -- I'm sorry, cyclical, rather -- that would deal with lifestyle upgrades, housing, auto-related. This will probably be a component that is undercontributing at this point. And you can imagine that in the state of the economy right now, the first of those is strongest. And the last will be around secular driver of demand, which is really to say e-commerce, where we continue to see penetration in e-commerce as a percentage of retail sales. And the reason that it's important, if you don't know, is that the intensity of warehouse space use in e-commerce is much higher. So every time you have migration of sales moving out of brick-and-mortar over into e-commerce, there's this multiplier on the space need, which is what has been propelling our space for the last 15 years or so. But it's continuing to run, and we're seeing e-commerce drivers of demand, very strong in our business still. Our portfolio, this is a snapshot of the U.S., which is our largest market. Europe would be second, followed by Japan and LatAm. But using the U.S. as a prototype, you see the kind of markets we're focused in. There's been a lot of discussion in recent years, of course, around tariffs and how do tariffs impact trade and demand in our space. What you need to know about Prologis is that we're focused on the end consumer in the end. And so while the tariffs affect the macro and we're watching all those headlines, when the questions come at us around, well, what does it mean to where goods are produced? And is it moving from China to LatAm to Europe? How does that affect your business? You can see, well, we are relatively agnostic to that because what matters to us is that goods are continuing to be consumed at the highest rates in the markets we're in, L.A., San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, London, Paris, et cetera. And the other characteristic of these markets is that we're going to tend to favor higher barrier to new supply markets, either on the market itself or with regard to the submarkets. When we are in close in submarkets in any of these locations around the globe, we like to highlight that they're not making any more land. And logistics is a very high land use for what it is. So the ability to get competitive product in and around our standing 1.3 billion square feet is very, very difficult. In addition to our operating business, we are also a very large developer of logistics space. This dovetails with a discussion we'll have around data centers here in a moment. But on logistics space, you can see we've built out an incredible amount of our portfolio, about $30 billion. I'm sorry, $50 billion, $30 billion outside of the U.S. I would think of Prologis as developing on the order of $4 billion to $5 billion of new logistics facilities every year. That's going to be 80 to 100 projects around our markets. What's important is that we own or control through options, a land bank where we can develop the next $43 billion of logistics facilities, which is 8 to 10 years of runway on development, which is very high. We used to target having maybe 3 to 5 years of land bank to build out. But the opportunity that we have in front of us is very large. And when you compound that investment, when you match it up against the track record on margin realization, the 29.1% below there, that's a very strong amount of value creation embedded in growth ahead for the company. So let's talk about data centers, and I'll start just by saying that we are not a data center company per se. We are a logistics company. But what we see here is an incredible opportunity to develop new assets or convert logistics assets to data centers. This has always been a profile of our investment strategy. We always believe that logistics will have a good case for higher and better use opportunities given where our assets are located, not only in premier markets, but close into consumers. And we've seen that episodically over the last decades where a logistics park will become a Facebook's campus. They come in and buy the warehouses, tear them down and build a new office campus, have these conversions in retail, life science, et cetera, over the years. It just so happens that the opportunity in data centers is the most prolific, profound opportunity where the demand is so large. And also, it probably does not entail tearing down the logistics building because most of these buildings look and feel like a data center. Anyway, they're just in need of energization and then certain mechanical cooling, HVAC power upgrades to facilitate the data center use. And we have 6,000 buildings as a palette to look for opportunities on and 14,000 acres of land, as I just referenced on the previous slide. So if you think about companies out there engaging in data center development, it is very rare that any of them would have such an incredible palette of -- you need a few ingredients, real estate, power and then the development capability. The real estate, we just have income producing in our portfolio. And any time we see a higher, better use opportunity, we're going to engage on it. The second piece is the data -- I'm sorry, the power piece. And that's what you see here. We have now amassed 5.7 gigawatts of power, 1.8 gigawatts of that secured, the remaining 3.9 in advanced stages. You should think about the time horizon on those categories as roughly 3 years in the former, maybe 5 to 6 years in the latter. But that's plenty of runway. And all of these gigawatts are in some phase of discussion with large hyperscalers predominantly for use. Now -- and I'll come back to Q&A in just a moment. I'll just say that this not being our core business, the way we're executing on this strategy and getting to the value creation opportunity that we see here, some illustrations of what that could be is we're executing this in a build-to-suit format only. So we're not building data centers speculatively. That's a very critical way that we're derisking what this business could be for Prologis. And then similarly, in terms of the long-term use of the facility that's not been our core business, we're exiting these assets at their stabilization. So after we energize it, lease it and build it and the customers moved in and has stabilized, we have been taking these assets back out to market and selling them to a long-term owner. I mentioned earlier, asset management business that we have at Prologis. You can imagine -- and banks approach us all the time with their ideas to kind of combine these business lines, which may have a lot of merit, which is to utilize third-party capital to sell down the interest instead of an outright sale, generate a fee stream, keep some residual option value in the assets for the future, particularly well located data centers that have ample power. That may be an asset we indeed want to have some foothold in over the long term. So we are in exploration of strategies to capitalize the business in our strategic capital business as well. I think what I'll do is just come back to Q&A at the end, if that works. And I'll go pretty quickly here. Part of the reason that we've had a large amount of success here is that we also stood up an energy business at Prologis 5 or 6 years ago in earnest on a 1.3 billion square foot footprint of logistics facilities. We have an incredible amount of roof space, roughly -- similarly, 1.3 billion square feet of roofs, which are a great place to generate solar power. We are the largest on-site producer of corporate solar energy in the U.S. And that's on just about 5% of our portfolio today. We just crossed 1 gigawatt of power production and storage in our portfolio. You can see our ramp going back about 5 years, where we began investing in the business more in earnest and are now at a really good run rate to expand our energy capabilities here, heading towards 2 gigawatts, we think by the end of this decade. I highlight all that here because you can imagine, hopefully, the synergy between this kind of business providing renewable energy that's very much needed out in the energy jurisdictions and of the major power providers and also storage solutions, et cetera. So we have a strategic relationship with major utilities, such that when we have applications and our hand out to them for power and data centers, we have a very strong relationship to build from, and it's been an important part of our success in aggregating the 5.7 gigawatts that we had. Another really important ingredient to the business overall, but in particular, the ability to capitalize on the data center opportunity is the strong balance sheet that we have. We have the best rated balance sheet of any U.S. REIT, A/A2 rated. When you look at a lot of the coverage or leverage metrics here, they are very good. I would say what is really heralded by fixed income investors, it's not the strong ratios on their own, but when you multiply these ratios by the incredible scale that we have, $200 billion roughly. When you just then start to compute the sheer amount of excess EBITDA this represents or the sheer amount of wholly owned unencumbered assets on our balance sheet, we are a very secure investment from that perspective. There's a lot of debt capacity for us to leverage, fueling our growth from here. A few statistics here on the strategic capital business as well, which goes back to our founding, but it's a very important part of the way we grow the business from here. The combination of those two things having the effect of us not tapping equity markets for any of our growth, it has been pretty incredible over the last 15 years through any follow-on equity raises. This is just a description of then how historically, our business model has worked. We have typically developed new logistics assets on our balance sheet and then use the strategic capital business to take those stabilized assets after they are completed as a means of recycling capital back into next year's development, harvesting the value creation and building a fee stream on top of it. And it's been this synergistic business model that has generated and will continue to generate the potential for high single-digit earnings growth going forward. One thing that is in play right now with regard to the potential for that high single-digit earnings growth that a lot of REITs are going through right now is just the adjustment to interest rates that are now present in most of our jurisdictions. We have a very low installed base of interest rates from the past cycle, and some of those rates are marching upwards. So that's been a headwind on earnings growth. We'll have 5% or 6% earnings growth this year, for example, contemplated in our guidance. But the go forward, once all that is normalized, should provide a business model that would provide that high single-digit earnings potential with a, call it, a 3% dividend on top of that in terms of total return. It's a business model that's generated returns. I don't need to dwell too much here in terms of cumulative shareholder return and dividend growth. They've been quite strong. And then just I'll leave the conversation here on just a conversation we've had with investors about how much of this is in the stock price today, how do we think about valuation. Because the REIT industry, for those of you who are familiar, has had a history of looking purely at kind of dissolution value. What is the value of all the assets against the debt, what's left for the shareholders, and hasn't had a strong practice of looking at franchise value and platform values that I think are very much in play for Prologis given all the things that we do, either in logistics development, strategic capital, the data center opportunity, et cetera. So we make this case a lot as much as we can. I'll spend 2 more minutes just on the logistics business generally, just to give you my sense of where things are this quarter. Obviously, it's our main business. 90% of our overall earnings come from the basic rental and operations business. Logistics performed exceptionally well early on in COVID. Many of you will know, the supply chains were seized up. Many of our customers were taking down large volumes of space. In the U.S. market, vacancy dropped to about 3%. It was very, very low. And that's at a time when customers were talking about building much more resiliency in their supply chains and taking more space than they needed at the time, providing room for growth. As things begin to turn out of COVID and recovery was emerging, most customers led by Amazon -- kind of famously, they made some announcements around this -- wanted to turn against that strategy and start to tighten up their supply chain and their cost structure again. So that led to a period across the back half of '23, '24 and much of '25 where net absorption demand in our markets was slower. And it's now grown vacancy to a little over 7% in the U.S. And so there's -- most of the discussion in our business has been around inflection in those conditions turning, which we have been vocal about in the last few quarters, we think, is really happening. We've had a number of record leasing quarters in the past 6 quarters now. I think we've had 3 all-time records out of the last 6 quarters. We've seen rents stabilize and begin to grow in many of our markets. What to think about in terms of cash flow growth is that even with all that said, we see market rents today as 18% above rents that are in place. So if we do nothing else, just migrating rents up to market as they expire year-by-year -- and our lease terms are about 5 years in length, so that's the pace it will occur under -- we'll have that NOI coming. But the next factor beyond that is well, what are replacement costs? What does it take to build a new logistics building? And what rent would be required given that cost? You can infer that rent, you see that another 23% above market. So when markets stabilize, that would be the next economic force driving rents upwards, which is what really excites us in the business as well. So we're seeing that inflection carry out. We're very encouraged by it. Headlines, of course, we're all launching numerous headlines that could affect the macro. But putting it aside, we feel really good about what our customers are doing. So move over to Q&A. I know we have one out in the audience.

Yes, I've got some questions, but since there were hands up, let's go out there and take the questions that you guys have.

Did you have one still?

[indiscernible].

We'll address it. Okay.

Maybe one of the things you can talk about is you talked about not raising equity, right? And that's -- you have a unique source of funding for the business globally, really. So maybe talk a little bit more about that and how you've been able to do that? The demand, to continue to be able to do that from the Prologis side and the funds that are out there?

Yes. There's a couple of sources. The first -- I was Treasurer at the company for a long period of time, so I'm always thinking about the debt side of the balance sheet and holding ratios. The credit rating I described, we hold very dear. I should say we're -- I'm not going to put that in harm. So if I think about solving to something like debt to EBITDA and we have EBITDA growth that is sitting in the high single digits, you can just think mathematically like, well, if that moves at that rate and the debt portfolio, which is $45 billion of debt on $200 billion of assets or so growing at high single digits as well, if nothing else, there's about $3 billion, $2.5 billion, $3 billion of debt capacity just growing for us organically year in and year out. That's one important component. So that provides a base sign of growth. But the other piece is the utilization of the strategic capital business. We leverage LP investments, both in core assets and also increasingly in development side of the business to grow the asset base, but to also recycle capital. So the combination of those two things is what facilitates new investments in logistics assets between the roughly $5 billion of development I mentioned. We also acquire maybe $2 billion of new assets a year. We can do all of that without tapping external equity markets, then holding the balance sheet and leverage levels at very strong numbers.

Awesome. Question?

Just on the power and the data centers, did you show how much was the U.S. versus [indiscernible]?

Yes, it's predominantly the U.S. We have -- do we have something, Abhishek? It's -- I don't think it breaks it out by -- this is -- it's hard to see. We've kept it secret there. There's a map of the U.S. -- of the globe behind there. This is just kind of an indication of markets where we have power in these categories. You can see -- this doesn't give you where the gigawatts are, but you can see the locations are more numerous in the U.S. and the overall levels are higher here as well. Europe is a bit more challenging here on the entitlements and power aggregation. But we do have such a large portfolio there that we'll see redevelopment opportunities there as well.

Maybe just -- do you know how much more power you would need, facility in the U.S. [indiscernible]?

I would say in most any case that I can think of, the current power at almost any of our facilities would not be sufficient. So almost everything has -- I remember looking at this because it's not that really new to us. We've looked at this opportunity for a decade or so. It's just gotten much more interesting recently, of course. But we always look at the intersection of where is their power and where is their fiber. And 10 years ago, it seemed like the gating item was more around well, where is their fiber. Now it's completely flipped. That's of ancillary importance. It's much more about where the power is. So I think as we see more inference use versus the language model training center use, we see more inference around metros and in our [ closer-end ] facilities where some of the power consumption will naturally be a little bit lighter. We may see that there are facilities that actually today have more adequate power. But my going-in assumption is that most users are going to require some upgrade. One thing I didn't mention and should is, of course, topical now is also the prospect of bring your own power or bring your own generation, and we'll see how that evolves over time. But it's another thing that's very unique to Prologis. I can't think of other logistics or even data center players who are engaging in this. But by right of having this energy production business, which has historically been around solar production and storage, it also had a business we built around it on EV charging, which is in different phases. It's a little bit slower in the U.S. as you can imagine from administrative changes there, but Europe is still quite strong. But the combination of all those capabilities has led us to an on-premises power solution as well that we've now installed 1 use case in Southern California and 1 in the Netherlands. Now these are around logistics uses where the time line to power was extended and customers wanted to see if we could put something on premises, which think of as typically liquid natural gas. And we've been building those solutions as well. There's a question, how much will be the capital in that business from here. That's something in evaluation. But we have the expertise to bring those solutions on board. Which -- if bring your own power, bring your own generation becomes much more the state of play, we are ready to facilitate that need. Yes?

Just [indiscernible], would you know what the [indiscernible] generation source?

By what?

Generation source there is.

It's all dual-fed utility. That is going to be dual-fed utility power at this point. So none of what I'm describing about on-prem. Or we get asked about SMRs and other things down the road. We're not in that world yet. So this is traditional grid power.

There's been a lot of talk on [indiscernible]. Can you talk about what you're seeing [indiscernible]?

Yes. Yes. The question is around the state of logistics market in Southern California. Of the markets that needed some adjusting through the COVID run-up and then normalization, SoCal was the poster child. And for anybody unfamiliar -- I'm indexing numbers here. But if rents in SoCal were $10 per square foot a year, just kind of close to what they were, they became $26 in our markets for our property type and relaxed down to maybe $16, $17, something on that order. So there's been a lot of focus on the change from $26 to $16 or $17, but we still are rolling a lot of leases from $10 up to that $16 or $17. So from our -- for the incumbent perspective, it's still a pretty strong market. There's still very positive rent change. But that level of rent growth, going from $10 to $26, was so exceedingly high in a short period. It repelled a lot of users, a lot of demand left the market. SoCal was plagued with a port labor strike for about 15 months that went on very long, and there was a lot of new supply in the market. So it's been the most challenged of all the logistics markets, it's very topical from that perspective. I would say for the last year now, maybe even a little more, it has been on a more positive trend. Now it's not to say that vacancy hasn't continued to build. It has. It's probably peaked out as well. It's also had rent declines over that period, but we also think that is probably around its bottom and will be inflecting soon. The tone is much better. We've had some improving occupancy numbers. We have a much better located portfolio in Southern California than others you may follow. Our holdings are principally in the Inland Empire. And of that overall submarket, it's Inland Empire West as well, and that has been the submarket that has been improving the most quickly. It's more modern stock. And so rents have come down. Users are finding they can actually move into Inland West, get a more modern, larger, higher clear height building out of -- or what are some cycle lows on rents. So we've been benefiting and turning the corner a little more swiftly, I think, than the market has in large. But we feel great about the market. It's our largest market, about 20% of our portfolio there. And serving 24 million square feet at the end of the day in a very supply-constrained market. So we feel very good about the prospects of SoCal.

So less than 2 minutes left. Let me close with one question. Hamid Moghadam, Chairman and CEO for many, many years, founder of the REIT industry in many ways in the industrial space, certainly, has retired. And you and Dan have taken over the helm. So maybe talk about what's changed, what's the same and the plan going forward?

Yes. Hamid's great. He's with us still in an Executive Chair position. Many of you will know, but -- so Dan Letter is our new CEO, he took that role at the beginning of the year. He, like me, has been with the company for 20 years or so. We both started in 2004, had been a developer before that. And in his post, he's run a number of regions, was our global CIO, was our President for a while. So Dan and I and all of the EC really have grown up with Hamid. I wouldn't just say we're sort of trained by him, but I think we're very strong believers in everything that this company is and it does and the stewardship we provide the balance sheet in the sector. So I think you're going to see -- Dan and I hope to execute with the new [ ECM ] company even more swiftly. There's a lot that we aim to do. There's a lot of opportunity to seize here in data centers and growth of our strategic capital business. But you're not going to see any strategy shifts, anything that moves away from our knitting of consumption-based infill, logistics real estate, focus on the customer, utilizing strategic capital and creating a lot of value through development. Like that's the core of this company, and that will continue.

That's great. Well, Tim, thanks for being with us today. Audience, thank you for being here. Cordova 3 is the breakout session. Everybody, have a great day.

Thank you.