Gross industrial demand in Mexico broke a record at the end of 2021, totaling just over 6.6 million square meters, of which about 42% was concentrated in the Monterrey, Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez markets.

Monterrey reached 1.4 million square meters of gross demand during 2021, leading the first position at the national level, while Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez registered 769 and 612 thousand square meters, ranking third and fourth, respectively.

The border area and the north of the country managed to capture a large part of the industrial demand under the umbrella of the T-MEC where the relocation of productive processes of reshoring and nearshoring were deployed in the main entities of the north and the border.

The crisis brought about by Covid favored reshoring, allowing the production of goods to be returned to the company's original country when previously they were supplied by importing products from other distant markets, as is the case with Asian markets. For its part, nearshoring favors the model by which a company from its creation decides to produce near its location, where its market is.

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This situation anticipated a favorable scenario for the Mexican market that had the infrastructure, maturity and institutionalization to respond to demand in the face of destabilization in supply chains.

Another relevant factor is its proximity to the United States, one of the world's markets with the highest demand, as well as the advantage of qualified labor in Mexico, which allows for more competitive cost structures.

Manufacturing was the great trigger for demand in sectors that were beginning to recover, such as the automotive, household appliances, medical and electronic devices, along with other suppliers of inputs such as the steel, aluminum and plastic sectors.

It was closely followed by the logistics sector, whose growth was driven by the increase in electronic commerce, mainly concentrated in the binational areas of Tijuana-San Diego and Ciudad Juárez-El Paso.

The Mexican Association of Online Sales (AMVO) recently pointed out that e-commerce grew by 27% between 2021 and 2020, after a remarkable increase of 81% between 2020 and 2019, right in the middle of the pandemic.

This situation led logistics companies to demand two types of formats: Distribution centers (Cedis) and last-mile warehouses. The Cedis or large stores that exceed 50 thousand square meters and generally located on the perimeter of the city and other last-mile distribution centers to reduce delivery times.

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In the case of Monterrey, in the last quarter of 2021, demand was driven by companies in the manufacturing, logistics, electronics and automotive industries, with Apodaca and Ciénega de Flores being the submarkets with the highest incidence of total demand with 42% and 28%, respectively. .

In Tijuana, during 4Q 2021, logistics, automotive, aerospace, manufacturing and packaging industry companies were installed in almost 240 thousand square meters of quarterly demand.

Finally, Ciudad Juárez registered a demand in the last quarter of the year that tripled the demand in 4Q 2020, driven by the manufacturing, logistics, automotive, medical, plastic industry, electronics, and shelters.

The trend seems to continue in 2022 since these three entities together managed to group 55% of the national demand in the month of January 2022, with Monterrey in first place, reaching almost 100 thousand square meters of demand.