From equipment dealer to operator: the unattended “Times” car park (1991)

From the selling side to the renting side

It is easily told as the story of someone who thought up a new kind of car park. But the core of the shift was not the machinery; it was moving the source of revenue from other people’s equipment to the company’s own utilization. The park-lock had been the same device since 1971, and what Nishikawa Kiyoshi changed was his position relative to it — from selling it to leasing the land and installing it himself. Going from a trade whose sales turned on a landowner’s investment decision to one determined by how many of your own bays were full is, it appears, what produced earnings stable enough to support a public listing.

That said, it is hard to credit a tenfold rise in five years to Nishikawa’s idea alone. The 1991 revisions to the garage law and the road traffic law, and the empty central-city plots left behind by failed land assembly, arrived at the same moment. Nishikawa himself resented the verdict that his business was a child of the gaps opened by the collapse of the bubble, and would ask whether anyone really thought a company begun with $2,778 (¥1m) of capital had been carried to an over-the-counter listing that way. The force of the objection is itself a measure, from the other side, of how strong the tailwind was.