CUSHMAN & WAKEFIELD APAC
122
The built environment is a great metaphor for globalisation . It ’ s getting axiomatic to say that the great cities of the world are becoming more alike , and that if you were to be dumped at random in any one of them the buildings alone would not be a sufficient clue to where you were . Populations are migrating to these environments because this is where the industry , commerce and housing is all concentrated and as a result , cities are getting larger , sometimes exponentially as populations explode .
Global businesses have one thing in common – they need premises , offices , factories or shops . Another thing is that , totally dependent as they are on getting the working environment right , securing and maintaining and managing those premises is very unlikely to be their core business . They universally resort to the services of a specialist to source , negotiate and eventually manage their premises , whether these are rented , leased or owned .
It was in 1917 that J Clydesdale Cushman and Bernard Wakefield went into the real estate business together in New York . A measure of its success is the number of times it has been acquired by larger groups – most recently in 2015 merging with another long-established global real estate services provider DTZ , backed by the privateequity giant TPG to create a company in contention to become the world ’ s largest company in its space . The strength of the Cushman & Wakefield brand is recognised in its adoption as the name of the new entity , which has an annual turnover of more than $ 6bn and some 45,000 employees . The year following the merger , 2016 , saw the company transact over $ 191bn in deals and today it has a total of around 4.3bn sq ft of commercial property under management .
Cushman & Wakefield ’ s clients include many if not most of the biggest global businesses , including the likes of Unilever , Nokia , Lego , Coca-Cola , Nomura , Zurich Insurance , Rolls-Royce or Shell Oil ( for whom Cushman & Wakefield negotiated the largest office space lease in the world in 2011 ). It ’ s also a truism to state that companies like this would not place a business-critical asset in the hands of a firm they did not trust implicitly .
JULY 2018