Kontron Awarded Gold Vendor Rating From Independent Research Firm Venture Development Corporation

Business Wire, Feb 8, 2002

Business Editors

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 2002

Kontron (FRANKFURT:KBC) receives Gold Vendor rating in three distinct merchant computer board categories.

Kontron, a leading global embedded computer technology company, was awarded a Gold Vendor Rating from Venture Development Corporation (VDC) - an independent research organization.

Kontron received the Gold Vendor rating in three merchant board categories: General (all bus architectures and form factors); PCI, and CompactPCI.

"Kontron is extremely pleased with the Gold Vendor rating," stated Thomas Sparrvik, CEO Kontron America. "Kontron has recently made significant acquisitions and product announcements in the embedded computer market to offer OEMs one of the widest product portfolios, as well as enhanced engineering and customer services. Ultimately, the award is a recognition from customers for our ability to effectively deliver the right products, support and services to meet their needs."

"The Ratings were obtained through the use of an impartial model, proprietary to VDC," stated Eric Gulliksen, Program Director of VDC's Embedded Hardware Practice. "We measured such factors as breadth of product line, on-line resources, trade association membership, ISO certification, as well as user perceptions. Because the model was heavily weighted toward user perception of non-product vendor selection criteria, those vendors achieving gold status may feel comfortable that their firms are highly regarded in these respects by their customers."

Kontron is already one of the largest suppliers of the broader embedded, industrial and specialty computing systems markets. These markets represent a nearly $6 billion opportunity according to VDC. In addition to merchant computer boards, Kontron also offers higher-order integration services, custom engineering, middleware support and value-added vertical market applications.

About Kontron

Kontron is a leading global embedded computer technology company. Kontron supplies a diversified customer base of OEMs, system integrators and application providers in the communications, automation, transportation, medical, military, aerospace, test and measurement, and encryption security markets. The company helps its customers to considerably reduce their time-to-market and to gain a competitive advantage with products including high-performance open computer platforms and systems, single-board computers, man-machine interfaces and mobile computers. Kontron is a member of the Intel Applied Computing Platform Provider Program (ACPP Program). Kontron employs over 1100 people worldwide and has manufacturing facilities in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. The company is listed on the German Neuer Markt stock exchange under the symbol "KBC."

For more information on Kontron, please visit: http://www.kontron.com.