The Franois-Charles Oberthur SA group is handing its bank and security card manufacturing business over to Bull SA’s Bull CP8 Smart Card unit in exchange for a 10% stake in the new CP8 Oberthur. The enlarged company will produce over 25m cards a year. Separately, in Spain, the Fabrica Nacional de Moneda y Timbre – the Spanish Mint and postage stamp printer – has signed Bull CP8 to a $7.6m turnkey contract to establish a Smart Card factory in Madrid. The plant is to have annual capacity of 8m cards, both simple memory cards and embedded microcontroller Smart Cards. Excel Data, owned by the Mint, Bull Espagne, Visa Espagne, Telefonica Sistemas and Microelectronica SA is to market the cards in Spain, Portugal, and later in Latin America.
