Savills has set up China Desk, a special section within its Warsaw-based Corporate Finance & Valuation department, dedicated to Chinese investors interested in the Polish commercial real estate market.
Piotr Klapkowski is in charge of services for Chinese equity investors within Savills Corporate Finance & Valuation department headed by Kamil Kowa. Piotr joined Savills in October 2016, having gained professional experience in real estate in Beijing, including three years as a manager in the valuation and advisory department of Cushman & Wakefield’s China office, where he participated in the IPO of Dalian Wanda, one of China’s leading developers, sized at approximately $3.9 billion. Piotr is a graduate of the Gdańsk University, a Chartered Financial Analyst and an MRICS.
“In 2016, Chinese investment volumes on the global real estate market hit approximately $33 billion, a 55% increase on the previous year’s level. The largest transaction was the $6.5 billion acquisition of the Blackstone Group’s hotels by the Anbang Insurance Group. In Poland, one of the major recent transactions involving Chinese capital was the acquisition of Logicor’s portfolio by CIC (China Investment Corporation) from Blackstone for €750 million in Q4 2017. Its Polish portfolio comprised 28 warehouses with a total area of approximately 925,000 sqm and was part of the pan-European €12.25 billion portfolio. As Poland is seeing a growing number of commercial properties of a scale large enough to represent opportunities to Chinese funds, it appears reasonable to begin attracting capital from that part of the world,” said Piotr Klapkowski, China Desk Leader, Corporate Finance & Valuation Department at Savills.
China and Poland have been committed to strengthening economic cooperation for years. Poland has joined the Belt and Road Initiative comprising 68 countries, whereby China pledged $100 billion worth of investments. The country also attends regular meetings of the 16+1 Initiative, a platform of cooperation between China and CEE countries, whose last summit was held in Budapest in November 2017. In addition, Poland is a shareholder (1%) of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), founded as an alternative institution to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and has pledged to contribute approximately $0.8 billion. The AIIB is a potential investor in the country’s Central Transportation Hub.
