Parkable is entering the China market in a move it hopes will double the size of its business within 12 months. It’s a joint venture with China-based investors and will be based in Shanghai.
Auckland based Parkable, a Deloitte Fast 50 winner, provides staff parking solutions for enterprises and small businesses and a sharing economy-style public parking app. Last year Parkable acquired Brisbane’s Park Genie and is now also operating in Sydney and Melbourne.
Parkable CEO Toby Littin. states: “China is the second biggest parking market in the world. We have the world’s leading parking management and sharing economy technology, but we needed to find experienced China-based partners to help us to invest at scale and deploy our offer into this most challenging of markets. We have found awesome partners, who have 350 employees and infrastructure to support the roll out of Parkable, and after nearly two years of product development with them are ready to go.”
“China has some of the world’s most congested cities and car ownership is still booming which bodes very well for our offer. The Chinese government is trying to address this with park sharing incentives because there are only 0.8 parking spaces per car compared to an average of 1.3 in developed economies and the last thing they want to do is build more parking buildings. We hope we can help them a little with that.”
“In addition, China is becoming the leading market for EV (electric vehicle) adoption and so part of our offer there will be about booking and paying for EV charging stations.”
The three joint venture investors, Tony Fonicchiaro, John Hore and Todd Pearson have over 45 years of China experience between them, are all Shanghai-based and have managed the China and Asia operations of international businesses as well as China-based start-ups.
John Hore adds: “After living and working in China for several years I have seen rapid development in many areas, however, parking is not one of them. The pressures of parking have only increased due to the increasing number of vehicles on the road due to the emerging middle class.”
Tony Fonicchiaro says: “Parkable’s product for China will lead the way in terms of innovation and will offer a potential solution to congestion in cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing by opening up unused parking spaces that exist in many buildings. China was made for Parkable.”
