The first 400 000 totally South African-manufactured Prism SIM cards for GSM cellular telephone service provider, MTN, have rolled off the local production line.
The cards are part of a multi-million rand MTN order for SIM cards placed at the end of last year with Prism Card Technologies, part of JSE-listed Prism Holdings.
"This milestone has major repercussions for Africa`s burgeoning cell phone and smart card industries," says Chris Dewe, MD of Prism Card Technologies, the only vertically integrated smart card development and production facility in Africa.
"Not only are we now helping to contain costs and improve availability by being able to manufacture SIMs locally, we`re also helping to open up mobile and smart card commerce to the region by being able to provide a total end to end service."
Until now, while Prism embedded and personalised a wide variety of smart-cards at its production facility in Springs for numerous different local and export customers, GSM SIM cards for MTN were sourced from abroad.
All card manufacture and chip-embedding, plus pre-personalisation and personalisation programming - the "smart" component of the process - was previously carried out in France by Oberthur Card Systems, the world`s leading supplier of bank cards, Visa and MasterCard cards.
This included embedding unique cell numbers, security and network ID capabilities to MTN specifications on the SIM card.
"Local production also gives MTN more flexibility in terms of card profiles as well as improving delivery times. We`re no longer shipping cards to and from France, so obviously logistics are easier," says Dewe.
In addition to such bottom-line benefits, Prism`s local manufacturing facility is also bringing new technology to South Africa that will enable the m-commerce for cellular users as well as facilitate the usage of smart cards in numerous other applications.
As the only SA-based value added development partner of Oberthur, one of the world`s largest suppliers of GSM SIM cards, Prism now has access to Oberthur`s Phase II+ SIM card technology. "This is ground-breaking technology that allows GSM as well as e-shopping applications to co-exist on the same card.
"It`s going to open up a whole new world of m-commerce here in South Africa not only in the virtual world of mobile WAP technology but also at the physical point-of sale," Dewe concludes.
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