SAN DIEGO—It helps to have a local concentration while building a global platform, Prologis's chairman and CEO Hamid Moghadam told Barbara Cambon, policy advisory board member of the Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate at the University of San Diego School of Business. Cambon held a fireside-chat-style interview with Moghadam during the BMC's 22^nd Annual Real Estate Conference here Thursday.

At Cambon's request, Moghadam gave a brief summary of his 35-year history with the company that has become Prologis, from working just to “keep the lights on” to building a firm that now has between $75 billion and $80 billion in assets. He spoke of creating AMB as an independent public company focused on industrial and proposing a merger to Prologis in 2010, which was the largest M&A deal in CRE history, he said.

Moghadam also described how his firm is different from other REITs in that it is very global—in 19 countries on four continents, including countries such as Japan, China, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico. “We're following our customers around, and we have operations all around the world. It's helpful to have a global platform if you want to be global to serve your customers.” A vast majority of Prologis's 1,600 employees are local, from the country in which the property is based, and he said one must “build a local business up through a global platform.”