Developers in Poland have seen signs of growing demand for warehouse space from manufacturing companies, according to the Rzeczpospolita newspaper.
An increasing number of manufacturers appear to be deciding to relocate production from Asia to Europe, with a growing proportion of manufacturing companies among new warehouse tenants in Poland, the paper said on its rp.pl website.
It cited Robert Dobrzycki, CEO of industrial space developer Panattoni Europe, as saying that “these are the first symptoms of a trend whereby manufacturing companies are seeking to overcome their dependence on Asia and bringing production closer to the consumer.”
Despite the coronavirus crisis, demand for warehouse space offered by Panattoni Europe in Poland increased in the first quarter of this year and remained strong in the next three months, the rp.pl website reported.
'Big manufacturing workshop'
Poland’s president and prime minister earlier this year urged stepped-up investment in Europe to stimulate economies and help them recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
President Andrzej Duda told the media in May that the disruption triggered by the virus across the European Union was “comparable to the worst crises that have hit the world so far.”
He added that Europe needed big-ticket investment projects to gain "a fresh impetus for development."
He also argued that the continent should again become a "big manufacturing workshop" and scrap a policy of moving production to Asia and other parts of the world with lower costs because this causes supply chains to break and leads to shortages of products at a critical time.
'Bring back … all those industries'
Meanwhile, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said at the time that Europe must "reinvent itself" after the coronavirus crisis and “bring back … all those industries, those business sectors, that have been outsourced abroad for various reasons, sometimes very far away.”
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Source: rp.pl