Oberthur Technologies

» see oberthur.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I have been swapping SIM cards in Turkey for most of my adult life and I have never once known who manufactured one. That is the normal relationship with Oberthur Technologies. It was a French company that made the secure chips inside SIM cards and bank cards for other companies' brands. Passports too, later on. The only name printed on the finished object was always somebody else's. Hundreds of millions of people carried its work in a pocket without a reason to learn it.

The name ended on 28 September 2017 at La Seine Musicale outside Paris, where Didier Lamouche stood in front of roughly two thousand guests and announced that OT-Morpho was now IDEMIA. The corporate merger behind that announcement had actually closed four months earlier, on 31 May 2017. For those four months the company was called OT-Morpho, where the OT stood for Oberthur Technologies.

The lineage underneath it runs much further back than the company that died. François-Charles Oberthür registered as a printer and lithographer in Rennes in 1842. Jean-Pierre Savare took over the security printing side of that business in 1984, created a card systems arm the following year, then bought De La Rue Card Systems in 1999 and renamed the result Oberthur Card Systems. It listed on the Paris market in 2000. The specific entity called Oberthur Technologies only appeared in 2007, when the card business was merged with the rest of the Oberthur security operations into a single company, and it left the stock exchange again in 2008.

At the end it was large. Revenue was 3.0 billion euros in 2016 against 14,000 employees, with manufacturing in China from 2001 and India from 2006. Almost none of that was visible from the consumer end, which is the whole trade: a card company succeeds by being the part of the transaction nobody has to think about.

~ the dossier ~

~ the split that made it ~

The thing that set up the 2017 ending happened in 2011, when the family sold half of itself. Advent International agreed on 4 August 2011 to buy the Cartes et Identité business for 1.15 billion euros and completed the purchase that December, taking 90 percent alongside management while Jean-Pierre Savare and his family kept 10. The businesses that stayed behind were renamed Oberthur Fiduciaire and Oberthur Cash Protection. So the name forked in two. One branch went into private equity and was gone within six years, and the other is still printing banknotes today on a domain of its own.

Advent then went shopping with it. Safran opened exclusive talks in September 2016 to sell its identity and security arm, the business trading as Morpho, at a value of about 2.425 billion euros, and the sale finalized on 31 May 2017. Bolting Morpho's fingerprint and face recognition work onto Oberthur's card factories produced a group with roughly 2.8 billion euros of revenue and two heritages that did not share a customer base. Didier Lamouche, who had been running Oberthur Technologies, took the combined company.

~ the day the name went ~

Today oberthur.com answers, but what it serves is a short French page headed "Site actuellement indisponible". No squatter took the domain and nobody revived it. The business that used to answer there has been IDEMIA for eight years, and the Oberthur name itself went back to the printing half of the family, which never left.

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