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Olivier Piou, CEO of France-based smart card vendor Gemalto NV, predicts revenue in the vendor's banking card unit will grow during the second quarter despite a lackluster first quarter, but he declined to offer specific forecasts. Speaking to analysts Thursday, Piou said he had more "visibility" in the banking smart card segment than he had at the end of last year. Gemalto, the largest supplier of banking and other smart cards worldwide, on Thursday reported that first-quarter sales in its Secure Transactions unit were flat at 100 million euros (US$130.6 million). "We are back to a status, which is what we had before the crisis, which is relatively good visibility in banking," Piou said. Gemalto rehired some employees in March for the unit, which also produces pay-TV and transit smart cards, after having laid them off in January, Piou said. Banks ordered more EMV cards around the end of March after having cut back their orders and using up their inventories, said Piou. He did not specify which banks or which countries ordered more cards. "The December and January overall global news was pretty bleak, and even though we wanted to be prudent, we rehired people simply because we had good demand," Piou said. But Piou declined to predict whether sales in the Secure Transactions unit would top the 78 million euros in revenue it generated in the second quarter of 2008. The vendor reported shipping 69 million smart cards from the unit, most of them banking cards, during the first quarter of this year. That was the same number of cards the unit shipped during the first quarter of 2008. Gemalto last week reported its total sales for the first quarter fell by 5.4%, to 367 million euros from 388 million euros during the first quarter of 2008, based largely on a drop in sales in its flagship SIM card unit.
