Datasonic’s JV in Tanzania to take off this year

Datasonic Group Bhd’s joint venture (JV) in Tanzania is expected to commence operations within the next nine months, as the supplier of electronic passport materials seeks to tap into the African market.

Datasonic chief operating officer Danny Chew said the company was finalising the JV details with its partner before commissioning the border control-related security project.

“We expect to commence our JV collaboration with our partner by this year. It will require about six to nine months from now before we can start commissioning our project there,” he told reporters on the sidelines of Invest Malaysia 2018.

Meanwhile, Chew said the company had formed a partnership with Perum Percetakan Negara Republik Indonesia to facilitate the migration of all payment cards to EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) standards by 2021.

“The Indonesian government has spotted Datasonic as the ideal technology provider to assist them to go through the migration successfully.

“As of now, we estimate that there are over 100 million credit cards which are in circulation in Indonesia. These will be replaced in the first EMV migration,” he said.

He added that Datasonic would be focusing on its business expansion this year, both locally and in international markets.

Currently, Datasonic’s order book stands at nearly RM800mil, which provides an earnings visibility for the next three to five years.

“In the next few months, we are confident that we can secure additional contracts to our order book. As at Sept 30, 2017, our order book stood at RM1.3bil and we have recognised RM500mil worth of contracts since then,” he said, expecting the order book to surpass RM1.3bil by the end of the financial year ending March 30, 2018.

Source: The Star