Kudelski buys EDSI, but still in trouble?

chris

Troubled smart card company Kudelski has bought up a small specialist smart-card company that specialises in banking and pay-TV business.


Andre Kudelski, CEO EDSI (Etude et Développement en Sécurité Informatique) has an R&D and evaluation centre based in Caen, Normandy, France. Established in 1990, the business concentrates on banking smart cards, and with clients in the mobile phone and pay-TV arenas. It employs 30 people.

Financial terms were not disclosed, and it will be interesting to see how today’s (March 17) stock markets respond to the news. Indeed, Kudelski’s share price needs all the good news and help it can get having the unfortunate record of being the Zurich exchange’s worst stock performer in the past five years – down two-thirds of its market value in the past 12 months.

Kudelski’s Nagravision pay-TV encryption system has been compromised as far as German client Premiere is concerned, with reports of more than 1m pirated systems in use by German users. There are also quoted concerns about piracy at Echostar.

Some of the other problems revolve around Kudelski’s ownership of its OpenTV middleware business, and the risk to OpenTV from rival operators, notably NDS, muscling in on what was once OpenTV’s powerful position in the industry. For example, arch-rival NDS’ “Fusion” middleware project is coming to market this year, and two major potential clients are DirecTV and BSkyB, both currently customers of OpenTV – but likely candidates for a swap, and further hurting OpenTV’s numbers in the long run.

NDS’ president Abe Peled spoke about Fusion a few months ago saying: “Some of our current products were we are starting to run on that layer so that in the future they could be upgraded to Fusion. So as far as we can tell, it’s well on track both in customer acceptance and in our development.”

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