Smart card maker Gemplus winds up India R&D centre

A Gemplus spokeswoman in Paris confirmed the firm was closing its Bangalore R&D centre and relocating activities to Dubai which is easier to access. "We consider India a very important market for Gemplus but we are relocating the R&D centre to Dubai in order to better manage the Asian market," the spokeswoman said.

The Gemplus India official said a small team of marketing and sales workers would continue to function in India, as the country was a growing market. During its two-year existence, the R&D centre experienced difficulty recruiting and retaining its technical workforce and attrition rates were at a high 40 percent per year, the official said. The officials gave no details of when the relocation would take effect but company sources said Thursday was the last day of operations and employees who did not want to relocate had quit.

Gemplus, which is registered in Luxembourg, expects to be valued at between 4.4 billion and 5.9 billion euros ($6.86 billion) when it lists in Paris and on the US Nasdaq index next month. Gemplus had 1999 sales of 767 million euros and first-half operating profit of 47.8 million euros, up from 7.1 million a year earlier.

IDBI gets lukewarm response

MUMBAI: IDBI Bank — the first entrant in the smart-card market — has received a lukewarm response to its offering having issued just 5,000 within two months of its launch. IDBI Bank, when it launched `MoneySmart’ — the smart-card — had sought to issue 15,000 cards within the first three months of launch.

"The reason why smart cards have not picked up in the Indian market so far is because we could have ramped up more volumes, but for the fact that the organisation is undergoing structural changes. Before we take on volumes, we need to have our operations in place," IDBI officials said, adding, "We are now trying to aggressively market this product and expect issuances to pick up in December… penetration has reached one-third of its levels within two months. All in all the response has been fairly encouraging from the consumer". The bank claimed that card-throughput amounted to an average of Rs 250.