SmartCards Expo 2006 begins at Pragati Maidan tomorrow

New Delhi, Sep 5 (UNI) Over 225 exhibitors from India and abroad will be unveiling their products at the three-day 8th International Conference and Exposition of Smart Card Technology and Applications which begins at Pragati Maidan tomorrow.

SmartCards Expo 2006, Asia's largest and World's No 3 Smart Cards exposition, is being held with RFidIndia Expo 2006, e-Security Expo 2006 and India Mobile Forum 2006.

SmartCards Expo is concurrently being held with the Exhibition, a series of International Conference on "Emerging Technologies in Mobile Communications", "New Vistas in ePayments" and "Trends in RFID Technology and Applications" are being planned with the participation of experts from world over.

The overseas participation is more than 50 per cent and includes participation from the countries like Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom and USA.

Major global players like IBM, HID Corporation, Thales/Blue Star, Renesas, Atmel, Arrow/NagraID, Texas Instruments, MasterCard, STMicroelectronics, Infineon, Philips, Orga, Smartchip Limited, Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) and a number of other giants in RFID, e-Security, Mobile communications, Biometrics, are a part of the mega Expo.

Currently, SmartCard base in India is estimated at about 100 million. This is projected to cross 400 million numbers in a few years. Obviously, the Indian smart card market has great business potentials.

India currently has both GSM and CDMA technologies operating successfully and 3G technology is on the verge of being introduced in a big way.

Indian mobile sector is playing a significant role in the telecom penetration. This has been proved by the fact that the mobile penetration has reached 53 per cent as of March 2005, with a total number of connections reaching 106 million.

The total investment currently in the telecom sector is estimated at Rs 1897 billion, of which private sector share is Rs 1140 billion and public sector at Rs 768 billion. The investment requirement during next three years is estimated at 280 billion dollars.

UNI BBS CS RN1642