“Gone are the days of merely having customer service centres,” says Gauri Shankar Nagabhushanam, CapitaLand India Trust’s CEO. “Today, cutting-edge research and development (R&D) is happening out of India, and it’s happening in our parks.”
This shift is central to how CapitaLand India Trust is trying to reposition India in the minds of investors.
Listed on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) since 2007 and initially focused on business parks, the trust has steadily expanded into a platform spanning logistics, industrial assets, and data centres.
With a portfolio valued at around $3.7 billion as of June 2025, and spread across India’s major cities, it is currently the only India-focused business trust listed on the exchange.
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A different kind of REIT
CapitaLand India Trust is structured as a business trust, rather than a real estate investment trust (REIT), which means it can go beyond merely acquiring stabilised, income-producing properties.
It has the flexibility to undertake development projects and forward-purchase agreements, partnering local developers and providing construction loans. This allows CapitaLand India Trust to earn interest from development loans and secure high-quality assets locked in at an attractive pricing, contributing to its growth pipeline.
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In addition, the recent completion of Navi Mumbai Tower 1 Data Centre, along with its successful divestment of CyberPearl and CyberVale — a key step in its proactive portfolio reconstitution efforts to unlock asset value and strengthen financial agility — contributes to CapitaLand India Trust’s growth story.
As Nagabhushanam puts it, CapitaLand India Trust should be seen as a “Growth REIT within the REIT universe, and a stability play within the growth stock universe.”
This balance is deliberate, Nagabhushanam explains. The forward-purchase pipeline offers visibility, development projects capture India’s structural demand for new space, and acquisitions from the sponsor help provide opportunities to scale.
For FY2024, CapitaLand India Trust reported net property income of $205.6 million, a 14% increase from the previous year. Income to be distributed to unitholders rose 7% to $101.5 million.
This momentum continued into 2025. In the first half of 2025, CapitaLand India Trust’s net property income rose 11% to $113.6 million, while its distribution per unit climbed 9% year-on-year to 3.97 cents.
Hence, as Nagabhushanam describes, for investors who are accustomed to the predictability of REITs, CapitaLand India Trust offers faster growth. For those drawn to the volatility and upside of growth stocks, this option provides greater stability.
Riding India’s growth trajectory
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At the moment, India is the world’s fifth-largest economy, achieving around 6.5% annual growth in the 2024–2025 fiscal year. Its population is also young and overwhelmingly English-speaking.
More than 750 million Indians are of working age, and rising per-capita incomes are fuelling consumption, while the state and central governments are competing to attract investment by pouring money into infrastructure — from airports and highways to renewable energy grids and logistics corridors.
Yet, one result of this is, as Nagabhushanam points out, that India’s diversity is often misunderstood. “India is not monolithic,” he notes. “It is more like Europe or the US, a union of states with very different economic strengths.”
Mumbai is the country’s financial capital, Bangalore is the IT hub, Chennai and Pune are centres of manufacturing and industry.
Holding a portfolio across these regions allows CapitaLand India Trust to capture multiple drivers of growth within a single vehicle. The trust’s business parks cater to the IT and R&D sectors, its warehousing and logistics facilities serve the consumption economy, and its new generation of data centres anchors India’s fast-expanding digital infrastructure.
He calls these the three necessities of modern life — work, consumption, and (digital) play — and sees CapitaLand India Trust positioned across all three.
Understanding and navigating India’s complexity
At the same time, Nagabhushanam acknowledges the hurdles that come with doing business in India. In Hyderabad, for instance, data centre operators are required to use copper power cables, while in Chennai and Mumbai, aluminium cables suffice, a small regulatory detail that creates a significant difference in costs.
Project approvals may also sometimes take longer than initially expected.
This is also precisely why CapitaLand’s 30-year presence in India gives it an edge.
Nagabhushanam says that the group has built relationships with state governments, contractors, and landowners, and it has a large local team (over four hundred staff across multiple cities) providing on-the-ground intelligence.
In the midst of the pandemic, when only 4% of staff were physically working in offices, CapitaLand India Trust still collected 96% to 97% of rents. More recently, when the US unexpectedly imposed a 50% tariff hike on Indian exports, many investors assumed the impact would be severe.
On the contrary, it was business as usual for most of CapitaLand India Trust’s tenants, with some shifting operations to India to offset higher costs elsewhere.
What excites Nagabhushanam now are the structural shifts that will sustain demand for the coming decades.
The government’s infrastructure drive is creating new corridors of growth, the digital revolution is transforming how Indians live and work, and mobile penetration and fintech adoption are among the fastest-growing in the world. In turn, rising incomes are feeding directly into demand for housing, consumer goods, warehousing, and entertainment.
Against this backdrop, rents in Indian business parks remain comparatively low by global standards. As per-capita income rises, rents will inevitably inch upward, Nagabhushanam says, providing a powerful tailwind for long-term investors.
The pitch to investors seeking reassurance
For Singaporean investors familiar with local REITs anchored in shopping malls or office towers, CapitaLand India Trust offers a different proposition — a way to participate in India’s transformation.
CapitaLand India Trust upholds governance practices aligned with Singapore’s regulatory standards, and distributions are made in Singapore dollars, thereby removing much of the friction associated with investing directly in Indian markets. This dual identity — an Indian growth story packaged in a Singaporean framework — is what the management team believes sets CapitaLand India Trust apart.
“A significant proportion of the investments we have made between 2021 and 2025 will start to bear fruit from 2026 to 2028,” Nagabhushanam says. “We are committed to delivering stable distributions alongside a stronger pace of growth.”
The trust has already delivered an average of 4% annual growth in distributions over the past decade, a testament to its resilience and ability to navigate India’s foreign exchange and business environment challenges. The goal now is to improve returns further and build greater predictability into its growth trajectory.
For investors, the message is simple: India’s rise is inevitable, and CapitaLand India Trust wants to be the vehicle through which investors ride that wave.
About CapitaLand India Trust
CapitaLand India Trust (CLINT) was listed on the Singapore Exchange in August 2007 as the first Indian property trust in Asia. Its principal objective is to own income-producing real estate used primarily as business space in India. CLINT may also develop and acquire land or uncompleted developments, mainly for use as business space, and hold the properties upon completion. As at June 30, CLINT’s assets under management stood at $3.7 billion. CLINT’s portfolio includes 10 world-class IT business parks, three industrial facilities, one logistics park, and four data centre developments in India, with a total completed floor area of 22.7 million sqft spread across Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai. CLINT is focused on capitalising on the fast-growing IT industry and logistics/industrial asset classes in India, as well as proactively diversifying into other asset classes such as data centres.
CLINT is structured as a business trust, offering stable income distributions similar to a real estate investment trust. CLINT focuses on enhancing shareholder value by actively managing existing properties, developing vacant land in its portfolio, and acquiring new properties. CLINT is managed by CapitaLand India Trust Management. The Trustee-Manager is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore-listed CapitaLand Investment Limited, a leading global real asset manager with a strong Asia foothold.
About kopi-C: The Company Brew
kopi-C is a regular column by SGX Research in collaboration with Beansprout (https://growbeansprout.com), a MAS-licensed investment advisory platform, that features C-level executives of leading companies listed on SGX. These interviews are profiles of senior management aimed at helping investors better understand the individuals who run these corporations
