Bangladesh picks passport partners

22 March 2010

 

Bangladesh has chosen an international consortium to supply 6.6 million passports and 1.5 million visa stickers for the country.

The international tender to supply a complete system for issuing machine readable passports and visa stickers for Bangladesh was announced in 2009 by the Department of Immigration and Passports of Bangladeshi Ministry of Home Affairs. The successful bidder is a consortium of Malaysian IRIS Corporation Berhad, Polish Security Printing Works (PWPW) and Bengali company Dataedge.

Under the terms of the deal, PWPW is supplying 6.6 million machine readable passport booklets (MRP) and 1.5 million machine-readable visa stickers (MRV) within the next three years, with deliveries starting in March 2015.

According to PWPW, the contract for Bangladeshi passports marks an important step in the strengthening of the company’s international business. In 2009 PWPW delivered 350 tons of security paper for Turkish passports. Since the beginning of 2008 PWPW has been manufacturing biometric passport booklets for the Republic of Lithuania (more than 700 thousand units in total) and has also delivered a complete biometric passport personalisation system.