Introduction
I lead Cushman & Wakefield’s Supply Chain & Logistics Advisory platform across APAC and EMEA, focused on connecting network strategy, real estate and capital deployment into a more integrated, global offer. The expansion reflects what we are seeing across our clients — supply chains are no longer regional or operational conversations, but strategic, cross-border decisions.
Since joining the firm in 2022 to lead EMEA, my focus has been on helping clients navigate complexity, improve resilience and extract more value from their supply chain and logistics footprint — increasingly through better alignment with real estate strategy.
Current priorities
The current environment is best understood not as a single disruption, but as a compounding set of pressures across cost, capital and risk. Fuel prices may be the most visible signal, but the real impact is the way these pressures cascade across transport, production and inventory.
What this is doing in practice is forcing a reset of core assumptions — where to produce, where to hold inventory, how to serve customers and how much working capital is tied up in the system. Higher costs are not just eroding margins, they are increasing the amount of cash embedded across the supply chain.
At the same time, risk is being repriced. Even where disruption is limited, organisations are stress-testing supply chains against scenarios they were not originally designed for. The result is a growing tension between resilience, efficiency and liquidity.
Perspective: fuel, geopolitics, and real estate
Current tensions in the Middle East are acting as an amplifier of existing pressures rather than a single-point shock.
Fuel cost volatility is the clearest transmission mechanism into supply chains, driving immediate increases in transportation and shipping costs. However, the more meaningful impact is secondary — as energy costs feed into manufacturing and create layered inflation across the value chain.
For occupiers, the response has often been to build resilience through higher inventory. While this can improve continuity, it also increases working capital requirements at a time when competition for cash is already elevated, creating a more complex set of trade-offs.
This is where real estate becomes more central. Logistics and industrial assets are not just a cost line. They are a key lever in managing transport cost, inventory positioning and overall cost-to-serve. Network design decisions, including location and number of facilities, increasingly determine how effectively organisations can respond to these pressures.
For investors, this reinforces the importance of well-located, functionally relevant logistics assets that can support more resilient and flexible supply chains. For occupiers, it underscores the shift from incremental optimisation to more structural redesign of networks in response to a more volatile and capital-constrained environment.
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