The accelerated growth of e-commerce and the relevance of the last mile have opened the dialogue to create vertical distribution centers, underground warehouses and the creation of Dark Store spaces, whose main characteristic is sales through digital channels.

Sergio Pérez, executive director of Corporate Services at Newmark, considered that derived from the current health situation and despite the slowdown in many sectors, the industrial market presents healthy indices, with an availability rate between 3.5 and 6 percent in most of the markets and that absorbed approximately 2 million square meters nationwide during 2020.

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However, he insisted, there are still many challenges to be solved in the near future to continue creating a last-mile platform and customer response, as a result of the growing e-commerce sector.

He added that e-commerce jumped from 85.7 billion pesos in 2012 to 137 thousand 505 million pesos in 2018, only in Mexico, where according to Inegi, there are 74.3 million internet users and of which 93 by percent connect through mobile device and 32 percent through desktop computers.

32 percent report having made a purchase online, with young people between the ages of 18 and 34 being the main consumers of this "new" market. For this year it is estimated that the number of Mexican users will be 92.2 million.

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"With the great explosion of the delivery business we can see in the short term companies migrating to dark stores, spaces that store large amounts of inventory that will be demanded by online platforms, web pages or mobile applications and whose orders will be received, processed and sent from a single point that does not require infrastructure to receive clients, thus reducing the costs of the operation ”, highlighted the executive director of corporate services at Newmark.

This trend is expected to continue growing in the future if we consider that today only 3 out of 10 SMEs have implemented digital strategies. Only during 2020 the increase in electronic retail sales increased by 19.4 percent in Latin America; 18.1 in North America; 16.9 in Europe and on average 16.5 globally.

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