Munich, Germany, July 2, 2009 -- The SmartPayment Association (SPA), which brings together the industry's largestmanufacturers of payment smart cards, has completed its 2008 internalmarket monitoring activity, undertaken in order to get a betterunderstanding of the current status of the payment smart card marketand its key trends.

Key findings:

• With more than 580 million payment smart cards delivered by its members, SPA represents the vast majority of the payment smart cards market. This figure corresponds to a 39% year-on-year growth (2008 vs. 2007), showing the ongoing momentum of EMV deployment.
  
  
• Over 25% growth in all regions with the fastest growth seen in North America, where shipments have more than doubled, CISEEMEA (CIS countries, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa) with +65% and South Asia with +49%.
  
  
• Open-platform is gaining ground and now represents 15% of all shipments, a 72% increase compared to last year. This can be explained by the development of multi-applicative EMV cards. The 70% year-on-year growth in large memory product shipments and the large increase in open-platform dual interface card shipments confirm this trend.
  
  
• Both dual interface and pure contactless cards confirm SPA's expectations, outperforming the market with year-on-year growth rates of 140% and 66% respectively.
  
  
• DDA technology is continuing to gain importance, with 69% growth year-on-year, representing 25% of SPA members' shipments in 2008. Migration to DDA has started worldwide, and both Visa and MasterCard mandate that all cards should support DDA by 2011 in Europe. The SPA is about to publish a whitepaper that will present the status of DDA migration and highlight DDA success stories. This document will also outline the impact of DDA migration on banks at both technical and business levels.

"Alot of industries were severely affected by the financial crisis.Despite a slowdown in the SPA payment smart card shipments at the endof 2008, the smart card manufacturers are not as heavily impacted asothers can be", said Marie-Jane Denis, President of the Smart PaymentAssociation. "High volumes continue to be shipped around the world anda majority of regions carry on their migration to EMV standards."

The detailed figures of the SPA 2008 market monitoring are only available to its contributing members.

About the Smart Payment Association
Foundedin December 2004, The Smart Payment Association (SPA) is anon-for-profit organisation dedicated to promoting and facilitating theuse of smart cards for payment. The SPA members are Gemalto, Giesecke& Devrient, Oberthur Technologies and Sagem Orga.

The Association's main objective is to accelerate the transition from traditional, magnetic stripe cards to chip based cards by:

• promoting the benefits of smart cards for financial institutions by publishing use cases and success stories on innovative applications;
• ensuring optimal interoperability between all system components, for both payment and value-added applications;
• becoming the voice of the payment industry towards standardization committees and payment associations.

For more information, visit the SPA web site:http://www.smartpaymentassociation.org .