ASK is the recipient of the 2004 Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the contactless world smart card market. The award recognises implementing superior market strategies and establishing itself as the market share leader.
"The company has established itself as a leader in contactless shipments primarily through its successful participation in large scale, mass transit projects in Europe and the United States," notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Vihar Bhagwat. "Further, with the mass transit application being a mass adoption market, unit shipments have typically been high, helping ASK strengthen its competitive position." A unique client database comprises mass transit operators all around the world in Europe including all Portugal and Netherlands going contactless and the Paris area, the United States with San Francisco, Asia with Taipei.
ASK has lately developed a platform called TanGO with a new flexible and customised Operating System. "Operators would look to have applications integrating with the basic transit application to share costs and offer value to the customer. This would require higher processing and memory capacities," elaborates Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Karthik Nagarajan. "The innovation of the company in the field of interoperability is important for the overall maturity of the mass transit application and make an enhanced market in future." TanGO is also suitable for banking applications and ASK is now ready to be part of the global migration of contact interface banking smart cards toward contactless as Visa and Mastercard have launched pilots for the first phase of this technological enhancement. Founded in 1997, ASK is today the leading supplier of a comprehensive range of contactless cards, tickets, RFID tags and readers, complying with ISO and EPC standards. They address the mass transit, access control and e-government ID markets as well as the supply chain and logistics market. 50 million RFID cards, tickets and labels are already in use worldwide. Manufacturing is located in Sophia-Antipolis, France. Local offices are based in Paris, Singapore, Taiwan and Westport, USA.
