According to a report by global consultant CBRE, the emerging retail segment took up approximately 1.7 million sqft of warehousing space across Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR in 2014. It said a major share of fund raising by e-tailers is also expected to get channelised into building warehouses. The year 2014 saw investments worth more than $2.2 billion being raised by e-retail majors in India.
Past couple of years also saw the segment becoming a new addition to the mix of major office space demand drivers in India, as online retailers increased footprint for front-end as well as back-end requirements. By 2014-end, about 3.5 million sqft of office space had either been leased or was in various stages of negotiation by e-commerce firms across the country—a growth of about 400 per cent year-on-year, it said.