No quality issues with chips, says Datasonic

PETALING JAYA: Datasonic Group Bhd has denied any quality issues with the chips that it supplied to Percetakan Keselamatan Nasional Sdn Bhd (PKN), the current principal supplier of Malaysian passport booklets and chips.
“The passing rate of the chips after 100% quality control by Trub AG, Switzerland before shipment, 100% incoming quality control by Datasonic and PKN, is more than 99.76%. Therefore, there is no issue on the quality of the chips,” it said in a filing with Bursa Malaysia yesterday.
It said the rejection rate of chips is very small at only 0.24% out of the 523,940 units of chips that had been delivered and verified by the main contractor before production, as at June 24, 2016.
“There is no such thing as a large number of chips delivered to the main contractor had been rejected due to defects,” it added.
Datasonic delivered 1.02 million units of polycarbonate data pages to PKN between April and July 2016. The data pages comprised 121,000 thin polycarbonate data pages and 899,252 thick polycarbonate data pages with embedded chips.
It said the actual migration to the new passport with embedded chips in the polycarbonate data pages began on May 16, 2016 and the utilisation of the new data pages with embedded chips was less than 55,000 units in May 2016.
The company gave the assurance that all new and old passport holders will not encounter any problems in using the e-Gate, as long as they follow the new process of reading the passport.
“The new process of using e-Gate as shown in the notice at the e-Gate supplied and maintained by another vendor is to open the data page of the passport and put on top of the reader,” it said.
The government recently granted PKN a six-month extension to supply two million passport booklets and chips from June 1, 2016 till Nov 30, 2016.
Datasonic’s wholly owned subsidiary Datasonic Technologies Sdn Bhd was awarded two contracts by the Ministry of Home Affairs, in December 2015 and April 2016.
The first contract is for the supply of passport chips for five years or 12.5 million passport chips from Dec 1, 2016 till Nov 30, 2021 for RM318.75 million.
The second contract is for the supply of passport documents for five years or 13.4 million units from Dec 1, 2016 till Nov 30, 2021 for RM223.37 million.
Datasonic said it will be the new subcontractor to PKN for the supply of two million chips that will be embedded into the polycarbonate data pages and initial discussion on the terms and conditions as well as the draft subcontractor agreement between PKN and Datasonic stated on July 29, 2016.
“If everything goes smoothly, the subcontractor agreement between PKN and Datasonic for the supply of two million chips to PKN is expected to be signed and the necessary announcement will be made in compliance with the Main Market Listing Requirements of Bursa Malaysia,” it said.