CIJ: E-commerce continues to be the dominant topic in logistics, especially city logistics. Will these projects become an important part of your output this year?_x000D_ Everyone is talking about it but I don't see it happening. I don't see many of our competitors that are actually preparing city logistics hubs in the Czech Republic. The reality is you can't just go to some location and start running 1,500 vans per day from it. The authorities won't allow you to do it. I think ultimately city logistics will have to go through significant changes. There will probably have to be a system of deliveries and surcharges for daytime deliveries because city roads are already being used to 100 percent of their capacity then. At night they're hardly used at all._x000D_ Look at the city of Padua, Italy. They started last mile delivery in 2005. It's run through City Porto, which is a warehouse that's operated by a company owned by the city. It's the same structure as you have at airports, where there's a single operator handling the cargo. Because if you had 20 operators doing it would be a mess. It's like with a port, or an airport where the goods are distributed in an organized way. I think this is inevitable for cities like Prague. You would have to have someone in the municipality that will think about it and find the best location in terms of traffic so that DHL, PPL and the others can deliver the parcels at times when the levels of traffic allow it. It's not sustainable for everyone to do it during peak hours the way we do it in Prague._x000D_ _x000D_ CIJ: But you've been planning to do a city logistics project in Prague. What will happen with those plans?_x000D_ Ultimately, the sites we are preparing may not be suitable for city logistics. Most of them will be more useful as the headquarters for production and high- tech companies. We don't see them becoming a real logistics hub._x000D_ _x000D_ CIJ: Are prices for industrial properties at appropriate levels at the moment?_x000D_ If we look at the prices in the Czech Republic and in Germany, I think the spread between the square meter prices is too large. In the long-term, it will reduce, but it won't happen in this cycle. The difficulty for the Czech market is that there isn't much product being traded. That makes it difficult to prove what the value per square meter is, whether it's €1100 or €900 per square meter. Long term, though, what I believe is that prices for logistics properties will surpass the prices for big box retail, where the price per sqm will fall and the rents will drop. But logistics will continue to gain momentum because of e-commerce growth._x000D_ _x000D_ How well is the Czech economy positioned for a slowdown?_x000D_ I don't think that the Czech Republic or central Europe is in a bad position. If the bad times come, companies in western Europe will need to save money and the obvious place to go is Central Europe. Ultimately, it's up to us and it's up to the politicians to prepare the economy so that we can attract any businesses that leave the Western countries. And so far, we've been complete losers in that respect. We could absorb much more labor from the east and the economy would fly on the back of these people working at affordable wages._x000D_ _x000D_ In Bavaria, it's much different. No one there says there's a lack of people even though the unemployment rate is 2.7 percent. In the Czech Republic we think we have a crisis because there's 2.5 percent unemployment. Bavaria tells new investors not to worry about the unemployment because it's such a great place to live, foreign workers will come there to work. In the Czech Republic if you say anything about foreign labor, everyone gets scared to death. _x000D_ _x000D_ Because people think that foreign workers means dormitories on the edge of town full of guys that are going to make noise on Friday nights._x000D_ That's because we tell those workers they'll have to live in an old barn, that they'll make a bad salary and they won't be treated like normal employees. In Bavaria, they get clean houses and everything is prepared. We don't provide good conditions here and so the people end up behaving badly because they're frustrated. That's simply a fact. Rather than admitting they've made a mistake, the politicians carry out raids at companies, stopping production to check everyone's papers and make sure all their visas are up to date. They make a show of force, rather than making things work. We've completely failed in this respect and we'll feel it during the next slowdown. Unlike in Poland, we haven't managed to attract many new companies. If you talk to CzechInvest or the AFI, most of the expansion here came from companies that are already active here.