Digital Television Systems (DTVS), OJSC, a part of the innovation cluster Technopolis GS, located in the town of Gusev, Kaliningrad region, launched the smart cards production line. The enterprise will start releasing the access cards for subscribers of the leading Russian satellite television provider Tricolor TV at the end of December 2014. Sales market is supposed to be further expanded by attracting other customers.
A special room was allocated at the DTVS plant and the new equipment purchased to produce the smart cards. In addition, several employees, that have undergone relevant training, were transferred to the new highly automated line. The total cost of the project amounted to 2.5 million euros. The new production line allows manufacturing a wide range of smart cards that are applied in various industries: access cards, SIM cards, loyalty cards, etc. The new production embraces chips coding, sealing them into plastic cases and applying the images on the cards.
Currently National Satellite Company, JSC (the Tricolor TV brand) is the unique customer ordering smart cards. GS Group, as the Tricolor TV key technology partner, designs and manufactures full set of user equipment to receive satellite signal at the Technopolis GS enterprises. However, Tricolor TV had previously been purchasing access cards for subscribers from another company which also carried out the programming of chips for Pay-TV access. Microcircuits encoding will be fully provided by the DTVS, OJSC specialists with the transfer of production to the Technopolis GS capacities which would increase devices protection against unauthorized data copying and reduce the cost of the finished product.
The planned smart cards output volume will amount to around 3 million units during 2015.