Bain Capital, CDPQ’s lvanhoé tie up with Lodha for $1 bn warehousing JV

US-based private equity firm Bain Capital and lvanhoé Cambridge, the real estate arm of Canadian pension fund CDPQ, have teamed up with Indian developer Lodha Group for a $1-billion joint venture.

The JV will develop industrial and logistic parks as well as in-city fulfilment centres to establish a pan-India presence in the digital infrastructure space, Lodha Group company Macrotech Developers Ltd and lvanhoé said in a statement.

Each of the three partners will have an equity interest of about 33% in the property ownership while Lodha will lead the development, operations and management of the assets.

For Bain, this is the third significant India transaction in 2022. The PE firm agreed to buy a fourth of IIFL Wealth from General Atlantic and Fairfax in March for $485 million and then made a $175-million debt investment in real estate developer TARC Ltd.

For lvanhoé, the new platform expands its presence in India’s real estate sector and its relationship with Lodha Group. The firm had made an equity investment in Macrotech ahead of its initial public offering in April last year and then injected more money late last year. lvanhoé currently owns a 2.13% stake in Macrotech that is currently worth around $118 million.

Lodha said the new platform will create about 30 million square feet of operating assets. The first project is a 110-acre logistics and industrial park development at Palava, in Mumbai. The platform has started looking at the pan-India acquisitions of land and developed/ under-development projects in these asset classes.

Lodha is already developing about 300 acres of industrial and logistics park near Navi Mumbai. The company had last year announced a JV with Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing to develop 72 acres at the park.

Abhishek Lodha, MD and CEO at Lodha, said there is a huge demand for Grade-A digital infrastructure in our country thanks to the rapid digitization of the economy.

Chanakya Chakravarti, Vice President and Managing Director for India at Ivanhoé, said the partnership will help the firm expand its logistics portfolio in India.

“The new partnership potentially enables Ivanhoé Cambridge access to near city logistics opportunities as operators pivot to establish same-day delivery solutions, thus creating differentiated value in our portfolio construct and its scale,” he added.