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Tokoroa entrepreneur Phil Jones admits his home town is an unlikely base for a carpark technology venture he hopes to turn into a £1 billion ($2.72 billion) global business within four years.
Jones had quit his job as a sawmill manager to study law and management when, in
2002, he literally dreamed up the idea of a car-stacking system aimed at minimising parking space in big cities.
More than five years after he woke up in the middle of the night to scribble down plans for the invention at his kitchen table, Jones' U-Parkit business has a global sales network and has customers in Egypt, Australia and New Zealand.
He says the business, AHU Developments, has secured $20 million in global sales licences, has a healthy pipeline of international sales leads, and is on track for a £1 billion London Stock Exchange float in 2011.
The U-Parkit systems allows vehicles to be stacked up to eight high and is designed for urban centres where space is at a premium or carparking is not well developed.
"People ask me where I think it [the idea for the business] came from and to be honest I don't have a clue.
"It's just something that came to me. Certainly my thoughts weren't on trying to solve the issue of the car parking problems we have in Tokoroa because we don't have any.
"I'd worked in the timber industry for most of my life and then I went back into a tertiary education environment and I guess you start exercising your mind in a different way and perhaps that was the catalyst for me starting to think a little outside the square."
Although U-Parkit is competing against other companies also selling vehicle-stacking systems, Jones says his technology has attracted strong interest because of its simplicity, portability and low cost.
"Some of our competitors have very sophisticated and complex systems and what goes along with that is that they become quite costly to make and quite costly to run, so we do have significant cost advantage," he says.
The business employs about 30 staff across its engineering and design office in Tokoroa plus its sales and marketing office in Auckland.
It also provides work for about 60 sub-contractors and Jones says one of the advantages of being based in Tokoroa is having access to a pool of experienced engineers previously employed in the timber-processing business.
The aim of listing the business in Britain related to its global market.
"We think most of the demand will come from Europe eventually.
"I don't know that we can raise the sort of capital that I believe the business will be worth easily down here."
*Learn more at www.u-parkit.com
