Industry Car parks Website www.apcoa.com Founded 1947 Type of business Private | Area served 15 Countries worldwide Headquarters Stuttgart, Germany Company secretary David Carruthers | |
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CEO Ralf Bender (20 May 2011–) Founders Howard Metzenbaum, Ted Bonda | ||
APCOA Parking AG is Europe's longest-established full service parking management company. It manages over 860,000 parking spaces across 15 countries, and employs approximately 4,500 people. It is headquartered at Stuttgart Airport in Germany.
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History
In 1949, Howard Metzenbaum and Ted Bonda founded APCOA as the Airport Parking Company of America, Inc. in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1966, the company was acquired by the ITT Corporation and was made into a division of ITT. In 1970, APCOA Autoparking GmbH was founded in Stuttgart, under the German wing of ITT, called SEL. The company then expanded across Europe, entering Vienna, capital of Austria, in 1970; Sunbury on Thames, England, in 1981; Mantua, Italy in 1985; and Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 1989. By the mid-1980s, most of the European in-country subsidiaries had been divested from ITT, and slowly over the next ten years the management of APCOA Autoparking GmbH began to re-integrate the group under common ownership. The US operations of APCOA were purchased from ITT Corporation through a management buyout in 1975 and eventually merged with Standard Parking in 1998.
In 1991, venture capital company CWB Capital Partners of London financed a management buyout. The company changed its name to APCOA Holding AG in 1994, and again to APCOA Parking AG in 1995. It trades on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, with 75% of shares held by UK registered investors. In April 1999, Salamander AG of Kornwestheim acquired 27.1% of APCOA Parking AG shares, and took complete control in October of that year. The company continued to expand through acquisition, including the parking subsidiary of UK based FirstGroup. In 2002 EnBW-AG of Karlsruhe purchased 98.7% of Salamander AG, to virtually control APCOA Parking AG. After consolidating various partnerships to 100% ownership, the company continued its expansion into Eastern Europe, entering Rijeka, Croatia in 2003. The company was delisted from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2003.
Current operations
On June 30, 2004, Investcorp acquired 98.3% of APCOA Parking AG shares from EnBW AG through its vehicle Parking Holdings GmbH for €265 million including debt. In 2005 the company entered Switzerland, and changed the name of Parking Holdings GmbH to APCOA Parking Holdings GmbH (APHG). After a bidding battle with National Car Parks owned by 3i, and Australia's Macquarie Bank; on 19 February 2007 French based investment company Eurazeo announced the proposed purchase of APCOA Parking AG for €885 million from Investcorp. APCOA is presently the market leading provider of car parking (by number of spaces managed) in Germany (225,000 spaces), Norway (96,900), Denmark (61,900), Austria (48,100), Italy (42,400), and Poland (12,600).