The King of Parking in China Offers Us Cake

Lui Ju is a parking magnate from Beijing. He is known to his American friends as ‘Tom,” and speaks through an interpreter. He addressed the lunchtime audience at the National Parking Association yesterday in Mandarin with an invitation: ‘reap the bounty of China’s ‘money machine.’

“Someone who had been to America told me that a parking lot is like a money machine. China has experienced economic growth averaging 9.8 percent every year since 1978, and today is the world’s third largest market. We have two trillion in foreign currency reserves. So far 300 of the world’s top 500 companies have invested in China.”

But their parking industry is like a child wearing an infant’s clothes, Ju told us. There is obsolete parking management, insufficient parking spaces, and only about 60% of the parking that is needed for the growing number of cars, which reached 9.4 million this year.

“It’s a very big cake,” he told the parking executives, a huge opportunity. His company, Kingdy Parking, owns 150 lots, including handling parking for Beijing Airport. They’re even expanding into Southern California starting next year. He said that by 2012 there will be 110 million cars looking for parking all over China, at $1.50 a day each, which adds up to a $60 billion windfall.

There’s a new machine of money in China–and it’s Kingdy Parking.