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Ascendas to double investments in India
In a move that is seen as a vote of confidence for the Indian property market, business space solutions provider Ascendas Pte Ltd says it plans to double its investments in India over the next 18-24 months.
Already India's largest foreign IT park investor, Ascendas has invested over $384 million in India to date and is managing a total of 4 million square feet of office space there.
'Ascendas aims to establish itself as the brand for IT parks in India,' Ascendas chief operating officer Goh Kok Huat.
'We plan to secure enough projects in the next 24 months so as to double our portfolio from 4 million sq ft to 8 million sq ft,' he added.
Ascendas, which formed Ascendas India Pte Ltd in 2000 to spearhead its investments there, has IT parks in Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad.
It plans to invest in what it calls the 'tier-three 3 cities' and will be starting projects in Kolkatta and Pune over the next three months.
It has come to a preliminary agreement with the West Bengal government to develop a new IT park in Kolkatta, and a North India office was recently set up in Pune.
Ascendas, which is a unit of JTC Corp, had set up a private real estate fund in the middle of this year to hold IT parks in India. It has pumped two assets - International Tech Park, Bangalore (ITPB) and Vanenburg IT Park in Hyderabad - as seed investments into the fund. The fund aims to increase its asset size to $800 million, from $350 million now.
Its flagship project, the ITPB, is set to build two more buildings within its land area of 28 hectares.
One is a multi-tenanted building which will be completed by the end of next year, and another is a built-to-suit, single-tenant building for Tata Consultancy Services. The site currently has five buildings housing more than 100 tenants in over 2 million sq ft.