The World's Largest UIM Card from Axalto Supports The CDMA Launch of China Unicom Youth Brand

Business Wire, Sept 30, 2004

BEIJING -- GuangDong Unicom Aims to Promote Its New Brand "UP Xin Shi Li" With the Extended-Function Cards

Axalto (EURONEXT:AXL)(EURONEXT:NL0000400653), today announced the successful delivery of world's largest UIM CDMA cards to China Unicom. With the implementation of the latest 64K SIMERA(TM) Airflex from Axalto in the Guangdong province, China Unicom plans to promote its youth brand, UP Xin Shi Li, with a large suite of valued added services.

"With the world largest-capacity R-UIM card from Axalto, it has made possible the extension of our UP Xin Shi Li brand to CDMA network. This in turn has allowed us to provide more value added services and advanced applications to our customers, thus triggering a more exciting user experience," said Liu Chun, Marketing Director of China UNICOM in GuangDong Province.

UP Xin Shi Li is the first national brand of Unicom targeted at the youth. Designed for the CDMA users of this brand, the new SIMERA(TM) Airflex is up-to-date the largest capacity R-UIM card commercially deployed. It is designed to support value added services including nation-wide Uni-info services and Guang Dong Unicom UP Xin Shi Li services. Both services consist of a series of attractive applications such as Mobile QQ, Hot Lover, Games, news and weather forecast. End users can use their favorite applications in the abundant applications collections easily by simply clicking on menu items, without any trouble to remember all kinds of service codes.

"Different customers can obtain individualized services from us to meet their needs, and this new offering has helped China Unicom better satisfy the end users requirements, as well as open new opportunities for business development," adds Mr. Liu.

In addition, the new Axalto SIMERA(TM) Airflex is compliant with the latest release of 3GPP2 standardization, thus addressing the increasing demand for SMS and other value added services in the China market, as it can store more than fifty short messages and more than two hundred phone numbers.

"Axalto's latest and largest UIM SIMERA(TM) Airflex card is well positioned to help operators attract more subscribers by offering value added services. As such, users' personality and loyalty is heightened, which in turn helps to build up and strengthen the image for operators," said Tan Teck Lee, President, Axalto Asia.

With its leadership position and professional strength in its field, Axalto was successfully qualified by China Unicom to be its vendor, which further led to the UIM development in January 2002, and successful promotion of OTA services in Unicom. "By designing and supplying such a leading product as the 64K SIMERA(TM) Airflex to China Unicom, who is the unique CDMA operator in China, Axalto has once again demonstrated its confidence and commitment to the China market," Mr. Tan adds.

About Axalto

Axalto (Euronext:NL0000400653 - AXL) is the world's leading provider of microprocessor cards (Gartner Dataquest 2004)-- the key to digital networks -- and a major supplier of point-of-sale terminals. Its 4500 employees come from 70 nationalities and serve customers in more than 100 countries, with worldwide sales reaching 3 billion smart cards to date. The company has 25 years' experience in smart card innovation and leads its industry in security technology and open systems.

Axalto continuously creates new generations of products for use in a variety of applications in the telecommunications, finance, retail, transport, entertainment, healthcare, personal identification, information technology and public sector markets. Microprocessor cards provide convenience, security and privacy to public and private services operators, their customers and end users. For more information, visit us at www.axalto.com.