Company history

In August 1971 Nishikawa Kiyoshi, a salesman at an industrial fastener maker who had fallen out with his employer’s direction, left to set up Nishikawa Shokai in Tokyo. He began without a settled line of business and picked one off the street: the handwritten “no parking” notices he saw everywhere suggested a need, so he manufactured and sold no-parking signboards. It was a poor business to grow — a signboard came with a concrete base, which made it heavy to ship and cheap to sell.

The way out was a machine he happened to see at a restaurant in Daikanyama: the park-lock, an unattended wheel-locking device made by Nippon Signal. Nishikawa had no introduction to the company and simply kept turning up until he was given the sales rights; Nippon Signal had left the device with a trading house that was not shifting many, and handed the channel to a start-up instead. The agency contract was signed in November 1971. What Nishikawa then noticed was that hospital car parks, being free, filled up with people who were not patients. Starting with St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tsukiji, he offered a contract that solved the trespassing and produced parking income at the same time, and worked outward through the major public and private hospitals of Tokyo. By its third year the firm was turning over about $474,453 (¥130m) — and had quietly changed trades, from selling objects to taking charge of a site and collecting a fee on it.

Then it stopped. Nishikawa later put it plainly: he had built a company in his early thirties, it had worked, and he concluded that making money was easy — after which came roughly twenty years of scrambling when things went badly and slacking when they went well. Nishikawa Shokai was still a small company in the year to July 1988, with sales of $12.3M (¥2bn) and thirty-six employees. Park24 Co., Ltd. had meanwhile been incorporated in August 1985 to maintain and operate car parks — the name announced an ambition for 24-hour parking that the business had not yet reached — and it renewed the Nippon Signal agency contract in November 1990. Selling equipment left every installation in the hands of a separate owner, which is precisely why it could not scale.

In 1991, at fifty, Nishikawa decided that “at my age this is the last run I get as a businessman” and rebuilt the plan around two targets five years out: $111.5M (¥15bn) in sales — more than ten times the company’s size — and a stock listing. Before committing, he ran a test on Park24’s own land in Fukuoka to find where an unattended hourly rate should sit against the prevailing monthly-contract price. In December 1991 the first Times site opened in Ueno, Tokyo: five or six bays, a lock and an unattended payment machine, running 24 hours, operated jointly with the landowner.

The substance of the change was not the machine — the park-lock had been the same device since 1971 — but where the revenue came from. Nishikawa moved from selling equipment to landowners to leasing the land and installing the equipment himself, so that income no longer depended on someone else’s investment decision but on how full the bays were. That is what made the earnings steady enough to list. The group was organized to match: Times 24 was set up in May 1992 to take over collections, the management and maintenance divisions followed in 1993, and in August 1993 Park24 absorbed the business of Nishikawa Shokai, folding the founder’s original vehicle into the listed structure.

The timing was extraordinarily kind. The collapse of the bubble left landowners holding sites whose development had been cancelled and property taxes that had not, and an unattended hourly car park was the obvious stopgap income — as did the 1991 changes to the garage and road traffic laws. The network spread fast: more than 10,000 bays by July 1995, and the $111.5M (¥15bn) target met on schedule in FY96. Nishikawa bristled at being called a child of the post-bubble gap in the market, asking whether anyone thought a company started with $2,778 (¥1m) of capital could reach a public listing on luck. The listings themselves came in three steps in three years — over-the-counter registration in March 1997, the Tokyo Stock Exchange Second Section in April 1999, and the First Section in April 2000.

With the First Section behind it, Park24 began looking for business adjacent to the bays it controlled. Drivers’ Net was set up in 2000 for motorist services; the regional operating subsidiaries were merged back in during 2003; and in January 2004 Nishikawa Koichi, the founder’s eldest son, became president — keeping the company in the family while it diversified. Korea (GS PARK24) and a Taipei branch followed in 2006, and in 2007 the head office moved to Yurakucho, centralizing group management.

The decisive purchase came in March 2009: Mazda Rent-a-Car, a Hiroshima company with 18,000 vehicles and 385 branches, bought for a sum small against Park24’s operating profit at the time. What it bought was not earnings but time — a fleet and a procurement-to-resale routine that would have taken years to assemble from scratch — and, more importantly, a business that could sit on bays Park24 already paid for. While rivals entering car-sharing were defeated by the cost of parking their cars, Park24 simply rotated its own spaces. Renamed Times Mobility, it became the base for Times Car Rental and Times Car Plus. Roadside assistance was added in 2011, and a corporate split that May put parking, services and mobility into separate operating companies.

Then, in a little over a year, Park24 bought its way abroad. Local companies were incorporated in Australia, Singapore and Malaysia in December 2016; in January 2017 it acquired the three-country subsidiaries of SECURE PARKING; and in August 2017, through a UK holding company, National Car Parks (NCP) — the largest car park operator in Britain and the biggest acquisition in Park24’s history. FY17 consolidated sales reached $2.1B (¥233bn) with 4,577 employees, roughly a fifth more revenue and close to double the headcount of the year before. In two transactions a Japanese car park operator had become a global one.

In November 2019 car-sharing was transferred into Times Mobility, completing the division of labour between parking and mobility. Five months later that structure was tested from the worst possible direction. Lockdown emptied the city-centre car parks and evaporated the tourist and business travel that filled the rental fleet — the two businesses shared one footing, and it gave way at once. FY20 sales fell about 15% to $2.5B (¥269bn) and the group posted a net loss of $436.4M (¥47bn), the first serious crisis in its history. Abroad the picture was the same in Britain, Australia and Southeast Asia, with NCP carrying a large goodwill balance into a collapse in revenue. Park24 sold out of its Korean joint venture in September 2021.

The rebuild was financed in April 2022, the same month the company moved from the First Section to the new Prime Market: an overseas share offering raised $191.1M (¥25bn). The money went into fixing the foreign business, and the foreign business was then made to look like the domestic one — the Malaysian and Singaporean SECURE PARKING companies were renamed TIMES24 in October 2022, and in February 2024 PARK24 UK became PARK24 INTERNATIONAL, the holding vehicle for the overseas group. Sites, it turned out, had been the easy part; transplanting the way Times earns money has taken longer.

Recovery came through. FY23 sales of $2.3B (¥330bn) and net profit of $124.5M (¥18bn) passed the pre-pandemic FY19 level, and FY24 sales of $2.4B (¥371bn) stood some 17% above it. Nishikawa Koichi took the title of President and CEO the same year, and a January 2025 management briefing set out the plan as three axes — domestic Times, mobility, and overseas — with margin repair at home and a turnaround in the Australian and British car parks as the central tasks. Fifty years on from the signboards, the open questions are whether the overseas network can be made structurally profitable, whether domestic mobility can hold a profit, and who follows a chief executive now past two decades in the job.