SPAIN’S richest man Amancio Ortega - founder of the global high-street clothing empire Inditex – has just bought a chunk of Amazon’s headquarters, his second-largest purchase ever after buying the London Adelphi building from Blackstone.
Ortega, who started up his huge textile business with his late wife Rosalía Mera from a small shop premises in his native Ourense, Galicia, has purchased a large share of the building used by online retailer Amazon in Seattle for US$740 million (about €655m) through the estate agency he owns, Pontegadea.
The Inditex owner’s acquisition of the Troy Block – two of the 40 towers on the Amazon campus, owned by USAA Real Estate, the property arm of the insurance company linked to the US Armed Forces – is the biggest in the city’s history, according to The Seattle Times.
Until now, the large purchase in Seattle was that of the Columbia Center for US$711m (€630m) in 2015.
Pontegadea has now made its two biggest acquisitions in Ortega’s career history in the space of one year – the first being the Adelphi Tower in London for £600m (currently €702m).
Ortega invests part of the dividends from his shares in Inditex into property, and Pontegadea is Spain’s large estate agency, whose activity centres on buying giant commercial office buildings and renting them.
Through Pontegadea, Ortega owns office blocks in several of Spain’s main city centres, as well as in the UK, France, the USA and Asia.
In total, his property investments are worth just under €8.8 billion, based upon the company’s year-end accounts for 2017.
As the main shareholder of Inditex, Ortega, 83, will earn just less than €1.63bn from the firm in dividends – a hefty hike on the €1.39bn he netted in 2018.
Inditex’s best-known global brand is the budget high-street clothing chain Zara, which focuses on producing low-cost classics with a youthful twist and which is well-loved by Spain’s Queen Letizia and the UK’s Duchess of Cambridge, Princess Catherine.
Outside of Spain, its other brands are more of an unknown quantity, but are present on almost every high street in their home country: Zara’s ‘younger sister’ Bershka, cut-price streetwear casuals line Pull&Bear and young fashions outlet Stradivarius, all aimed at teens, pre-teens and young adults and designed for them to save up for out of their pocket money, plus mid-upper high-street labels Massimo Dutti and Uterqüe, both of which Queen Letizia wears, underwear brand Oysho, and quality mid-range interiors label Zara Home.
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