Difficult economic times have caused ANPR suppliers to switch their focus, placing greater emphasis on applications that generate a return on investment (ROI). Due to this strong ROI, parking time management has outperformed many of the other ANPR applications of late.

Michael Arluck, report author and analyst at IHS comments, “Parking time management can help car park owners to drive revenue growth by identifying and charging vehicles that have stayed beyond their allotted time limit. At the same time, retailers and shopping centre owners will often welcome, and even request, the installation of parking time management systems to help free up parking spaces for new shoppers and thus further drive retail sales.”

In the U.K., public budget cuts over the past two-to-three years have caused a number of suppliers, that had previously focused on law enforcement, to diversify into parking. Even as the EMEA market as a whole declined in 2011, the parking segment increased by 4.1 percent.

“The car park segment in Europe has evolved into a different business model than simply selling equipment to the end-user.” comments Arluck. “Typically, management companies will approach large retailers and agree to provide ANPR systems with on-going management of parking lots in exchange for a percentage of the fees collected from tickets. This commission-based model has been well received by retailers who might have been otherwise skeptical of the benefits of ANPR, or who are limited in funds to invest into non-core operations.”

In its latest ANPR and Detection Sensor research, IHS provides a thorough review of the various trends, economic, legislative, and technological, that shape the ANPR industry.