Orga Sale Is Imminent -- ERG trade data forum

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Date Posted: 18:57:01 02/25/03 Tue
Author: ( 2003-02-21 )
Subject: Orga Sale Is Imminent

Orga Sale Is Imminent
A buyer has emerged for financially troubled smart card vendor Orga Kartensysteme, with a deal expected to be announced before the end of February, sources tell Card Technology. The identity of the buyer and price of the acquisition was unavailable from the sources, but they say the buyer is not another card vendor. The sale will take in both the Orga card unit and a separate systems integration house that was earlier split off from the German vendor. But, it will not cover the rest of the Authentos Group, which includes the German federal printing office, the Bundesdruckerei. An Orga spokesman declined to comment on the deal, but did confirm the company is negotiating with "various interested parties" and indicated a deal was in the works. "These negotiations are currently at an advanced stage," says the spokesman. "The company�s management is confident that negotiations will be successfully concluded in the near-term." Authentos is largely owned by Landesbank Hessen-Thuringen (Helaba), a public bank which holds loans used to buy the group in 2000. That was when Orga was still considered one of the industry�s "Big 5" smart card vendors. Since then, Orga has been hit hard by the two-year slump in sales of subscriber identity cards for GSM mobile phones. The card vendor�s revenue fell to 174 million euros last year from 215 million euros in 2001. The 2001 revenue was down 22% from 2000. All told, Authentos, whose operations also include banknote printing and production of passports, reportedly lost more than 100 million euros last year, following a loss of about 450 million euros in 2001. The losses were mainly blamed on write-downs and operating losses for Orga.

( 2003-02-21 )

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