[9] According to The Economist, its business strategy is focused on warehouses that are located close to huge urban areas where land is scarce.
[8] Prologis began to expand its non-real estate business, Essentials, in 2022, offering customers solar power, racking systems, forklifts, generators,[11] EV charging infrastructure,[12] and other logistics tech equipment for purchase.
[15] They were joined by T. Robert Burke in 1984 and established AMB Property Corporation, which invested in office, industrial and community shopping centers on behalf of large institutional investors.
[14] During the savings and loan crisis, the company avoided significant financial repercussions by investing in industrial parks and shopping centers, and began to exit the office market in 1987.
[15] That year, AMB initiated an international expansion program focused on buying and developing distribution facilities near global trade hubs, particularly in growth markets such as Brazil, Mexico, and China.
[15] SCI invested in the Netherlands in the summer of 1997 and then expanded into Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Warsaw, London, Berlin, Milan, and Madrid.
SCI also expanded into the refrigerated distribution business in 1997, purchasing Christian Salvesen and renaming it CS Integrated LLC.
SCI acquired Texas Cold Storage and Continental Freezer in 1997 and secured the primary contract to distribute food for Kroger Co. in Illinois.
In 2003, ProLogis was added to the S&P 500 Index and entered the Chinese market,[14] and in 2004 the company acquired Keystone Industrial Trust for $1.6 billion.
[14] Amid problems with debt[21] following aggressive expansion[13] and heavy borrowing,[15] ProLogis' CEO Jeffrey Schwartz was replaced by Walter Rakowich in 2008.
[24] In March 2011, before the merger with ProLogis, AMB Property formed a €470 million joint venture with Allianz Real Estate.
[13] Completed in June 2011,[15] the merger was one of the biggest real-estate deals since the Great Recession, and it created the largest industrial real estate company in the world.
[38] In November 2013, Prologis announced plans to spend "as much as $600 million a year to develop warehouses in Japan," its biggest market after the United States, where it had customers such as Amazon.com and Nippon Express.
[44][45] That October, Prologis acquired Morris Realty Associates' portfolio of logistics and retail properties in the United States for $820 million.
[55][56] Prologis acquired competitor Duke Realty in October 2022, for $23 billion, completing the largest commercial real estate transaction in the U.S. since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
[57] Since 2016, the company has published white papers and its own market research, including the quarterly Industrial Business Indicator and the annual Prologis Logistics Rent Index.
[61] The study was updated in December 2022, reporting a 23% increase over 2020, with $2.7 trillion of goods either produced or sold worldwide passing through Prologis facilities, representing 2.8% of the global GDP with an economic impact of $300 billion.