All right, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jonathan Hughes. I'm one of the real estate analysts at Raymond James, pleased to have the Prologis team with us again this year. We have CFO Tim Arndt up here, and he will give you an overview of the company, what they do, how they drive value, and afterwards we'll have some time for Q&A, so Tim, I'll turn it over to you. Thanks for coming.
Yeah, great to be here. We always love this conference. It's great to see so many of you here this morning. So I'm with Prologis. As was mentioned, I've been with the company 20 years or so, and we are the world's largest owner of logistics real estate. We own assets in 20 countries around the globe, about 1.3 billion sq ft. I'll get to some of the details of that in just a moment. But with it being Tariff Tuesday, it's probably a good place to start here on page four, just a little bit of a description of what is the supply chain, where do logistics facilities play their part, and where is Prologis situated in it.
Because what this is attempting to relay is that there's a lot of warehouse or logistics facilities that have different purposes in the supply chain going from the production end, where raw materials are stored, then goods are produced, stored again before they get onto ships or trucks or rail to go off into further facilities where they're broken down, put into infill, city, last-mile distribution facilities, ultimately onto consumers. Where you see the little Prologis logos there, those circles, that's where we've put our portfolio, which is saying we've put it around the consumption end of the supply chain, having us be relatively indifferent to where goods are ultimately produced, and we've seen that over the last eight years in the age of tariffs and everything that's gone on with trade recently, as goods are moving from production in China to Southeast Asia, maybe to Mexico.
We've actually seen a big increase in Europe. Ultimately, if they're consumed in the big, large consumption centers, largely populated major cities of the globe, which is where our portfolio is, our demand has actually been quite steady. But I'm sure there'll be some additional questions on the implications of tariffs later, which we can take on. You know, stepping back broadly, logistics has benefited greatly from really the age of e-commerce. I would go back about 15 years now as e-commerce began to take root in the way we consume goods. I'll explain why that's such a large demand driver for us in just a few slides, but it's more than just e-commerce on its own.
What e-commerce and Amazon really have brought along for us is a much higher level of expectation and service around the way we consume goods: more product variety, faster service, faster delivery, more flexibility. All of that has required that the supply chain and warehouses get closer into consumers, not further out, which is the way it used to work in the decades prior. You could always go further out, get the cheaper warehouse. Now this is a strategic asset for retailers and consumer companies. So they need to be close into population centers, which then when you look at that against what's on the right side of this page, well, where can new supply be? And we like to joke that, you know, we're not making any more land anymore.
It's harder and harder to get distribution facilities and warehouses in closer to consumers because, frankly, none of us want to see a warehouse in our backyard, even though that's actually how we get all the things that we need. So that combination of rising demand and need and much more limited and challenging supply has made the sector very strong for the past 15 years or so, I would say in particular. If we widen out and look at what are the demand drivers more generally, we divide it into these three categories: basic daily needs, which are the things on our desks here, our water, toiletries, cosmetic, food, beverage, et cetera. Cyclical spending makes up about another third, which is going to be housing related, auto furnishings, et cetera.
And then structural trends is where we point back to things like, again, e-commerce and the transition of supply chain modernization that goes on really in all of the economies that we operate. So to spend another moment on why e-commerce is so popular or powerful, I should say, one, you just see its penetration, how much of retail sales is occurring in e-commerce. You can see it's nicely had a pattern here of being almost approximate to the year that we're measuring, meaning 2023, 2023 was about 23% of retail sales, 2024 about 24% of retail sales. We actually think we're going to see that pattern continue until about at least the end of this decade where we think there is further penetration in e-commerce up to about 30% of retail sales.
I noticed this morning as Target was releasing their somewhat more muted sales report, their e-commerce component of their sales rose 9% though, which is a really good trade for us. The reason it's so good, what the right side of the slide is explaining is that for the same $1 of retail sales being executed in the brick and mortar channel, it takes three times more logistics space to execute it in the e-commerce channel. And that's because the warehouse is not being used to just store goods and move large pallets back out of that warehouse and into the back of a store. We all know that box is being unpacked there. Individual parcels are being assembled there, sent out to all of us. The warehouse now also takes returns. The warehouse has much more product variety than stores have had in the past.
So all those things aggregate to three times more floor area needed in logistics. So you put the two together, there's a point more of penetration every year by year that got accelerated through COVID. You need three times more space. And now there's also the pressure of brick and mortar retailers needing to compete with that model and similarly needing to get in closer to consumers and replenish their stores. If I had a third element to it, frankly, it's, well, then what is the ability to pay for these more modern facilities, closer-in facilities? The left side of the chart here has a breakdown of supply chain costs in the view of our customers, where only 3%-6% is the warehouse cost on its own. The vast majority is wrapped up in transportation, labor costs.
So this, in a normal environment, is an easy trade for our customers to make to get more functional, closer-in facilities, win out on achieving the sale in the first place, and that savings can be in things like transportation and labor can easily pay for increases in rents, and so we've seen that. On the left side of this chart, you look at net effective rent. This was an error. If I had more time here, I'd spend a few minutes on how logistics rents performed in past cycles and really prior to the age of e-commerce and everything, but the short story is that they were often very flat. Didn't see a lot of market rent growth in logistics rents, and then you see this very powerful upswing through the 2010s, through COVID. Yes, rents overshot in COVID, namely in very large markets like Southern California.
Rents went up two and a half times through COVID. And that's one of the markets that is the largest culprit of the little bit of decline that you see. I like to imagine more. We should actually draw it on here, you know, kind of a dotted line between pre-COVID and today. And let's just accept that, yeah, they overshot and are now normalizing, but there's still tremendous rent growth that the portfolio has received. And then one thing that is imperceptible on the chart is that logistics leases tend to be about five years in length. And so what that means is that let's say 80% of our portfolio, 60% of our portfolio, many of our leases have not yet rolled up to the higher market rents generated through COVID.
We measure that actively in our portfolio and report it out as something we call the lease mark-to-market, which is just how much higher our market rents than what's in place today, and for us, that's still about 30%. And there's an additional concept of, well, what are replacement cost rents beyond market rent? What is the rent needed of the next marginal developer to build the next building? And we estimate that rent is another 15% above that. So the overall compounded delta between rents that we have in place today and what we think the rents are going to need to be to spur new development is 50% beyond what's in the portfolio right now, so Prologis, for our part, just backing up, you know, we're an S&P 100 company. We just actually received a credit rating upgrade from Moody's yesterday to A2.
So we're A-flat and A2 with Moody's and S&P. If you don't follow REITs, that is the best credit rating in all of REITs, aside from we're tied with another company, Public Storage, who doesn't use debt. So I don't really think that's a fair comparison. So we're very proud of the balance sheet we've built. We're $200 billion of assets that we have under our management. And what's on the screen here just demonstrates all of the other areas that we run the company in. I think beyond our large portfolio and operations, our other principal businesses are to develop new logistics facilities, which is on a run rate of $4-$5 billion per year. I'll spend a couple more moments on that in just a second. But we also have a large, call it private capital, private equity.
We call it strategic capital, but asset management business, where we run about a third, a little over a third of our assets within specific asset management vehicles. This generates fee income for us and really enables us to lever our capital and have a much larger portfolio around the globe. This is a snapshot of where we sit on a global basis. The numbers at the bottom, 86% of NOI. NOI is basically the rental income net of its expenses. When you look through our own balance sheet and our proportionate share of all the ventures that we manage that I just described, we're able to run this very large global portfolio, which is essential in logistics for our customers. But 86% of our NOI comes out of the U.S. So it's a very stable financial model in that regard, highly hedged.
We're not vulnerable to fluctuations in exchange rates in that regard. We're in most of Western Europe and Central Europe as well. In Asia, we're in China. Our largest market is Japan, Singapore, and we just entered India recently. I'll steer you quickly to the right side of this page, which is trying to explain a little bit more about our business model, how our operations intersect with that development business and this asset management business, which is of that $4-$5 billion of new assets that we build every year. We tend to build that primarily on our own balance sheet. And then what we do with these vehicles that we manage is it's offered up to them to buy that asset. It's not a put, it's not a call on either part, but it's offered up at appraised value.
Typically, you know, the way the model kind of works is let's say an asset costs $100 to build. Our historical margins have been about 30%. So post-building and leasing that asset, it might be worth about $130, let's say. It gets offered to the vehicle at that price. They give us cash back of, you know, it's consideration in total of that $130. What we tend to take back is some partial interest in the vehicle to uphold our ownership interest, and then the cash back. And then we plow that cash back into next year's development. So it's this self-funding model where we're creating and crystallizing that $30 in this example of value creation every year, year in, year out, while retaining an interest in the real estate itself, generating new fee stream and expanding the portfolio for our customers. Quick snapshot of where we're located.
This is just expanding on the point that we tend to be around the high consumption markets of both the U.S. and around the globe. So I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, for example. I love Cleveland, but we have no assets in Cleveland. We have no assets in Detroit. Markets like this, these are smaller markets where we may tend to see some uplift from onshore manufacturing, for example. We don't really think so. I can expand on that later. But that's part of the story that we're often debating with investors and ourselves on are these the attractive markets for us? But I think when you put back into consideration that if we saw some upswing in manufacturing or production in some of these secondary or tertiary markets, that could evaporate again in the next administration if we have a really different approach to trade again.
And so what we want to do is we want to be where you see us here, New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, San Francisco. South Florida is a big market for us, Atlanta, Dallas, et cetera. Just a little bit on the balance sheet. As I mentioned, we're with the upgrade. Yesterday, we didn't update the slide yet, but we're A2 now with Moody's. But in real estate, you know, 20-25 years ago when I started in real estate, I learned that you financed real estate 80% levered, which is shocking to me now. REITs really learned powerful lessons through the great financial crisis. We have drove our balance sheet to be about 20%-25% levered. We think that's adequate for a little bit of financial, you know, accretion down to the bottom line.
But we want to keep a lot of optionality and stability in the balance sheet. And I'm really proud, I have to say, with the way that we've moved the balance sheet up to the current rating and strength that we have today. Quick look at just who are the typical customers of Prologis. So, you know, across this 1.3 billion sq ft, over 6,000 buildings, we are merely leasing the building. At times, we have confusion on that from investors. If we're doing anything with regard to the operations internally, not at all. We merely lease the building. And so you see, you know, our largest customer is Amazon. At that scale, I think we are their largest landlord, but only about 5% of our rent roll is tied up in Amazon. And across our top 10 customers, only 15% is exposed to those top 10.
So we have a highly, highly diversified rent roll on that basis. And you can see not just the names that are involved here, but probably what's more important is a look at the segments that the portfolio serves. And manufacturing is not listed up here. I think it's embedded down in the other category. Going back to this production comment, we do have some of the portfolio that is steered towards manufacturing, but that's really in components of our Mexico and also Eastern European markets where we see a little bit more of that. But by and large, it's all consumption and distribution oriented. I'm going to skip these few slides in the interest of time. Look here just a little bit more deeply at our development capabilities. So you see here pretty incredible numbers. In the last 20-23 years, we have developed $47 billion of real estate.
You look through the margins there that we're describing, 29%, I guess, but $13 billion of value creation, and as I described in that self-funding model, the vast majority of that $13 billion actually crystallized in a transaction where a trade enhanced with our funds and cash was given back to the mothership to reinvest in the following year. I'm also going to jump through there. If we just look at the track record, and I don't know if you all can see that. Trust me, the bars look good. We've got very strong earnings growth since 2011, low double-digit CAGR-ized earnings growth, similarly on dividend growth as well. I should probably make a plug on the dividend. I mean, as an investor myself, maybe no surprise, my largest investment is in this company, but I love a hard asset company. I love a real business.
I love a business that pays a real dividend. We pay out now. We just increased our dividends. We pay out $4 billion in dividends every single year, or we will now and going forward, and I think it's a really great place to be in the kind of environment that we seem to be staring down right now, so just as we talk a little bit more on the state of the market then, because maybe perhaps some of you who follow the logistics market know that things have been normalizing from some of the more frenetic activity that we saw in COVID, so one very good story for us right now is on new construction starts.
So you see in 2021 and 2022, and these stories were echoed elsewhere in the supply chain, just that there was a lot of increase in activity and throwing capital into the business. We saw this in drayage and trucking companies and cargo companies. But similarly, in warehousing logistics companies, there were a lot of new development starts with all the excitement of what COVID was doing. And really, the call for more just-in-case inventory management that our customers were saying they needed as we had those supply chain shocks early in COVID. What it did is it built a very large under-construction pipeline really all around the globe, but in particular around the U.S., which as things began to normalize wasn't exactly great.
We had a lot of new supply coming into our markets at a time about 18 months ago when our customers were starting to retreat from a just-in-case inventory strategy, quickly started looking back at the bottom line and said, "No, no, no, we'll go back to just-in-time. We need to trim some costs where we can," and they abandoned some of the excess space that they had been building into their supply chain and trying to run things very tightly again. That's okay, but it does mean that there's this normalization occurring on that side in demand at the same time that all of these new starts. Typical warehouse building can be built in about a year, so if you cast out where all those light blue lines are about a year, that's when all the new deliveries are now coming into the market.
That has made pricing more competitive for us. So following years of market rent increases, we had one year where there was a 30% increase in market rents. We had a couple other double-digit years surrounding that in the last five years. We've now had last year where rents actually came in about 7% on average. But as I mentioned earlier, this lease mark-to-market concept with a vast, well, I shouldn't say vast majority, a large component of our portfolio still unrolled from those first wave of market level increases, market rent increases. Even though there's been a decline in market rents just in the last year, it does mean on average we are still rolling most of our leases up to market. In fact, in 2024, our average rental increase on lease renewal was 69%. So still very meaningful.
I think this year we think it's going to be in the 50%, so a lot of uplift despite the adjustment in rents. I'll skip that. This is worth spending a moment on it. Let's just look at 2024. Market rent spread to in place. So again, this is that lease mark-to-market concept. This is saying, you know, until we can roll everything up to market, when we look at rents today, there's 30% uplift. That represents about $1.4 billion, which as a REIT, we have to send out in dividends. So as that's coming, that's going to be the dividend increases we'll look forward to. But then replacement rent spread to market above that number, what's going to be the rent that's required to compel the next development building? That's another 15%. So that compounds down to 50%.
You know, we like to ask investors who are closer to Prologis and logistics, you know, what they would have thought the outlook was between now and 2019, just pre-COVID, when did it seem like the setup for rent growth was better? Because I think this is actually surprising to folks that actually the outlook is significantly better today. This is a big left turn, but outside of all of that logistics discussion, we have found ourselves as a very large developer, right? That $45 billion a year. We have a lot of expertise in energy, which I haven't yet explained, but we do a lot of solar energy generation on our roofs. That's another business line of ours.
As that intersects with AI and the implications that has had on data centers, we find ourselves that we've always been inclined to higher and better use conversion opportunities of our portfolio often, and we hope, frankly, that our warehouses might one day become office, retail, life science. We've seen those kinds of upgrades where the land use, the land value for those types of uses is much higher than the logistics value. We now find ourselves in a place where data centers is very much the right profile for that kind of conversion. and I'm sure many of you are following that sector. It's very, very hot for us. so we've invested, we've built a big team around a data center conversion business. We've got, I guess, about $1.5 billion in the ground right now.
We just monetized about $700 million in the fourth quarter in a large data center conversion we executed in Chicago. That deal had about a 100% margin between its cost and its ultimate value creation. If any of you are worried about the long-term outlook for data centers, so are we, frankly. We are not converting these, and I'm not being dismissive. Maybe it's a great business, but it's not our expertise. And there are reasons to be wary of its obsolescence. But what we see here is a near-term redevelopment opportunity to convert the assets up to a data center use, but then sell it, dispose of it, and get the capital back. Probably to keep redeveloping in that format, we see about 10 GW of redevelopment opportunity in our portfolio that'll take between five and 10 years to execute on, I imagine.
But there will be billions of dollars of value creation in there that we'll do in a build-to-suit format so we don't execute on these until we have the hyperscale customer in hand. And then some visibility towards an exit, maybe not fully locked up, but we want to know we'll be able to exit on the other side as well. So we've done it in a pretty de-risked manner that we're very, very excited about. This is just a little more information. If you go back and read the book on just what some of the power implications are for data centers, that's really the name of the game in this business right now. And then, you know, so just stepping back is where we sit in the market in terms of valuation.
I'll try to wrap up here, but you know, for all of the things that Prologis is offering, there's just been a little bit too much focus, I guess, in my personal view around the near-term, those market rent declines that I spoke to, which is really an adjustment, a sensible adjustment off the peak. A lot of focus on Southern California that we could talk about if any of you have questions. But some myopic focus, in my opinion, on that adjustment period, kind of not really zooming out and appreciating this as a hard asset business, very difficult to replace assets, tremendous cash flow generation already today, and a potential for significantly more going forward. REITs tend to be focused on in the context of NAV.
And if you don't know that, that's just saying, well, I'm going to pay for this company, whatever it costs, whatever I think it's worth if I sold all the assets and paid back the debt, what's left? And that is kind of an ancient context in our view that doesn't incorporate any of the things I just spent the last 15, 20 minutes talking about, the platform valuation and cash flow generation opportunities out of things like energy, solar, data centers, the strategic capital fee business, et cetera. So good. This is my wrap-up. I know I probably went a little bit long here, so I'll pause here and see if we want to hit any questions.
Yeah, maybe I'll start with one. Just on, you know, you talked about tariff impact, onshoring, nearshoring, you know, what's the house view?
Yeah, look, I think, you know, before last night, before even, you know, Canada and Mexico went into effect, and we've been talking about tariffs for a long time. I mean, we've been living in a higher tariff environment since the first administration. And, you know, Biden and that administration didn't undo really any of the tariffs that emerged, particularly in China, let's say. When we step back and zoom out and say, well, what wound up happening there really? We saw U.S. manufacturing increased about 2% across that entire period. So putting a little bit of proof to our belief that it wasn't really going to be able to do very much to incent significant amounts of onshore manufacturing of goods.
The labor arbitrage in many of these places is just going to be way too much to overcome, especially when you appreciate what tariffs are actually applied to, which is not the retail value of the goods, it's the cost. So you think about the margins embedded in what we're talking about, they're not going to have that much of an implication. On the other side, we did see limited growth in manufacturing out of China over that period, but big explosion in growth out of Southeast Asia, Mexico, and then also Europe. So it's just going back to this point that we're seeing things move around, but it actually isn't doing very much thus far, at least to spur U.S. manufacturing and hasn't really done anything on the consumption end.
So we are worried about what it means to the macro, and we're seeing that yesterday and this morning, and we have to watch how that unfolds. I think for us in the near term, what we watch mostly is decision-making of our customers. That can be something that tends to seize up, and customers try to see what they can do in their flex and what we call gray space before making, you know, these are longer commitments that they're making in logistics, at least five or 10 years, a big lease value, lots of employment of a labor force, other improvements into the facility. So when things are kind of as uncertain as they are right now in policy, you see a slowdown in decision-making. That's what we feel most.
But we think in the end, demand for our kind of portfolio where it's located is going to be strong.
Yep. I think we're about out of time.
Okay.
Thanks, everyone. We appreciate it. Thanks, Tim.