SECURE PARKING and NCP: building the overseas car park business (2016–17)

It could buy the sites, not the way of earning

It is easily told as acquiring the largest car park network in the world in a single year. But set the two deals side by side and what was bought was not assets; it was an estimate of future earning power to be amortized over twenty years. At NCP, an acquisition cost of $209.4M (¥23bn) produced goodwill of $376.7M (¥42bn), and the liabilities taken on came to $345.2M (¥39bn). A company that began in Ueno in 1991 with five or six bays can be seen here taking on a bundle of large, already-built car parks together with the promise of what they would earn thereafter.

It is too early, even so, to call the acquisition a failure. In the year to October 2025 the overseas car park business had sales of $563.8M (¥84bn), a fifth of the consolidated total. But the segment ran a loss of $9.3M (¥1bn), a level that only balances before deducting $9.5M (¥1bn) of goodwill amortization. What the securities reports still list as the task is reworking a portfolio skewed toward large, long-contract sites into something small, dispersed and dominant — that is, the work of carrying the way of earning built at home over to what was bought abroad, still under way eight years on. It could buy the sites; it could not buy the way of earning.