ASK Wins Contracts to Supply Contactless Smart Cards for AFC Systems in Tours and Grenoble.

Business Editors

ASK S.A., a world leader in dual interface contactless smart cards, announced two new contracts today - one from the "Centre" region of France and the city of Tours and a second from the city of Grenoble.

These awards follow a series of major smart card contracts awarded to ASK in the past year, which total orders for more than 7 million contactless smart cards and tickets for use in more than 35 AFC ticketing and highway toll projects.

Under the first of the new contracts, ASK will supply 80,000 dual interface contacted/contactless smart cards to the "Centre" region of France and the city of Tours. The two cards supplied are the GTML and the CD97. The cards are for use in the Automated Fare Collection (AFC) system on the 400 buses of the region as well as in the regional SNCF trains, and it will be fully operational in October 2002. The three public transport organizations that operate this system are the city of Tours, the French Railway (SNCF) and the Indre et Loire local authority. ASK will also personalize the cards used in the Centre system, including printing a photograph of the cardholder on the card and mailing cards to the fare card users.

In the second contract, ASK will provide the city of Grenoble with 90,000 dual interface GTML smart cards and 1,000 GEN310 contactless couplers, which are integrated into the fare readers and AFC system on the buses and trains. Deliveries will start in June 2002, and the system will be fully implemented in November 2002.

Using the ASK cards with the new AFC systems, commuters in the Centre region, Tours and Grenoble will experience the latest in advanced contactless smart card technology from ASK. Simply waving these cards near a reader built into the bus or train entrance will take off the correct fare. The same card is used for both bus and train fares, and in many cases cards can stay in a wallet or purse. The result is convenience, simplicity and faster bus and train entry for commuters.

Both the GTML and the CD97 cards are based on microprocessor chips, and are dual interface cards, meaning they have both contactless and contacted interfaces. This enables the cards to work in contactless readers, which is faster for transit applications, and also work in insertion style readers with contacts such as you might find in financial applications or readers connected to PCs. This opens new possibilities for re-loading fare value to the cards and potentially using them for other applications.

ASK manufactures the GTML and CD97 cards using an innovative process that prints the antenna with silver ink on a paper support, which delivers the advantages of contactless technology at a more affordable cost for transit operators. The typical read/write range is 4 inches (10cm), and the cards comply with the ISO 14443 standard. The CD97 card includes 2 Kbytes of EEPROM memory, and is designed for combining a ticketing application with an electronic purse and one other application. The GTML card, which has 576 bytes of EEPROM memory, is an affordable solution optimized for use in AFC ticketing applications.

In April, ASK announced they have shipped over two million of the world's first contactless smart paper ticket, called C.ticket(R). Using two breakthrough technologies developed by ASK, a patented printed antenna and the world's smallest ISO compliant contactless smart card chip, C.ticket combines the efficiency of contactless smart card technology with the low cost of a paper ticket. ASK has a complete range of contactless products, from the low-cost C.ticket to the microprocessor-based GTML, CD97 and CT2000 cards, as well as the GEN3XX readers.

The international smart card community recognized the contribution to the industry made by ASK's new C.ticket, presenting the company with two Sesame awards during Cartes 2001 in Paris, for Best Transport Application and Best Overall Application in France. The Sesames are acknowledged as the world's leading awards for innovation and leadership in smart card technology and applications. The company also received a UITP Innovation Award for the Best Transport or Travel Implementation for the C.ticket(R), and an innovation award by the PREDIT (French Ministry of Transport).

About ASK S.A.

Founded in 1997, ASK is today a world leader in the design, development, marketing and manufacturing of dual interface contactless smart cards. ASK has already supplied more than 7 million contactless cards and paper contactless tickets that are in operation in more than 35 cities in Europe, Asia and America. Clients include SNCF and RATP in Paris; transit operators in Newark, Toronto, Lisbon, Lyon, Venice, Naples, Taipei and Nice; and BMS, a project in France sponsored jointly by the financial services and transport industries. The ASK manufacturing and personalization operations are near Nice in Sophia Antipolis, France with commercial offices in Paris and Hong Kong. In October 2001 ASK announced that it acquired the manufacturing assets for the Venus contactless smart cards developed by Motorola.

C.ticket is a registered trademark of ASK S.A.