David Simon
Analyst · David Harris from Gleacher & Company
Well, David, I would say that the activity in the U.S. and our sector has considerably slowed. But that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be opportunities. I mean sometimes, they arise when you don't expect them and sometimes, you have to be patient. And that's been our mantra for quite some time. If you look at the history of our company, we've been -- the consistent history of it is we've been criticized every step of the way, but the good news is I think we've made a lot of right decisions. So when we bought CPI, nobody was expecting malls to really trade, and everybody thought we overpaid. But obviously, the history is that we did a hell of a deal. When we got into the outlet sector and after a few years of experience understanding the business, in 2000, we built a couple. We bought it in '04, we've grown that business. We brought it out of the kind of the dark ages into respectability both in terms of the returns it could generate, but also in terms of what retailers thought about it. And we brought more retailers into the marketplace. So my view of it is we've just got to be ready. You don't necessarily know when it might happen. We don't do deals just to do deals. Occasionally, our discipline has not been perfect. So every once in a while, we've done that, but we've done it on a basis that obviously financially, we could handle that. And so I'm not -- even though there's nothing eminent in the U.S., I'm certainly not thinking that, that won't have opportunities for us. But I also think internationally and in Asia, it kind of gets lost in the sauce here because of the size. But as I said in my opening remarks, we're going to have 11 centers in Asia. This is a portfolio. So our share in Japan is 40%, in Korea, it's 50% and so on. But that's going to generate over $220 million of NOI next year with the other growth prospects. In fact, tonight in New York, I have dinner with our Japanese partner. There's other areas in Asia that we're going to examine, so we've got lots of ways to grow the company. I'm not discouraged in the U.S. at this moment, but it's not like it was a year ago. Good news is we made a deal in '09 when others didn't, and we've also made the right decisions like in 2004. We didn't buy Rouse where others did. So I'm cool about everything.