Mumbai: Donald Trump Junior, the eldest son of US President Donald Trump, is on a week-long visit to India to push sales of the upcoming Trump Towers in the country.
On Monday, Trump’s local partners published a full-page newspaper ad offering potential buyers and investors of its latest Trump Tower at Gurugram, near New Delhi, a chance to “have dinner” with the 40-year-old who is at the helm of Trump Organisation since last year. Each apartment at the upcoming 47-storey luxury tower is being sold in the range of Rs5 crore to Rs10 crore.
For the New-York based company, which earns an annual revenue of $9.5 billion, India represents the biggest market outside the US. Since its entry into the Indian real estate market in 2013, four Trump Towers, with a total revenue potential of $1.5 billion, have been launched across Pune, Mumbai, Gurugram and Kolkata. The fifth one which is expected to be a commercial office project is likely to be launched soon.
In India, Trump Organization works with local developers via brand licensing agreements and does not make any equity investments. So far it has signed partnerships with five different local developers—Lodha Developers Pvt. Ltd in Mumbai, Pune-based Panchshil Realty, M3M and Ireo in Gurugram and Unimark Group in Kolkata. According to a 17 February report by New York Times, Trump Organisation has earned as much as $3 million in royalties in 2016 from its businesses in India.
No new project has been signed in India since Trump took over as president (in January 2017). The move comes following the announcement last year that the organisation would not enter into any new overseas deals while Trump is president. “The plan right now is to focus on completing sales and deliveries of the other existing projects,” Kalpesh Mehta, founder of Tribeca Developers, had said. Tribeca Developers is the official representative of Trump Organisation in the country.
Though widely criticised for pushing business interest under the Trump brand, Trump Jr in an interview with New York Times last week said he has been “cultivating relationships in India for a decade and that his company was “now seeing the response of that effort”.
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