Smart parking partnership to tap promising market

Smart parking has great potential in China where parking spaces are limited and used inefficiently, industry officials said during a business forum today.

In Beijing and Shanghai, smart parking plays a key role in an efficient transport system. It can help drivers find parking lots and tackle the problem of disorderly parking, Shan Zhiguang, a senior official of the State Information Center, told a forum of the Annual Shanghai International Commerce Convention which opened today.

The forum aims to connect latest technologies and traditional industries like property, retail and transport, said organizer Wanda Group

ETCP Corp, China’s biggest smart parking service provider which had raised over 2 billion yuan (US$294 million) in the past two years, announced that it was partnering Shanghai-based Patel to cooperate on parking data analysis and smart transport.

Both sides will work on real time data analysis, automatic plate recognition, driver-less technologies and other intelligent vehicle systems.

The user data and smart parking technologies will be integrated in a smart city system that connects businesses like car sharing, in-vehicle intelligence, commercial property and retail, industry officials told the convention. 

Wanda-invested ETCP, which operates more than 6,000 intelligent parking lots in 200 cities, expects to generate a revenue of over 100 million yuan in 2017, Tan Long, chairman of ETCP.

China has more than 200 million cars, which creates a parking market of 600 billion yuan annually.