Company chronicle

From 2000: A new millennium

The second step towards privatisation
In 2000, the Federal Ministry of Finance sold its 100% stake in Bundesdruckerei to Apax Partners & Co., an international company which advises capital funds. Bundesdruckerei GmbH, Bundesdruckerei International Services GmbH, ORGA Kartensysteme GmbH, Holographic Systems München GmbH, Maurer Electronics GmbH, D-TRUST GmbH and the Polish subsidiary iNCO Sp. z o.o. came together under the roof of the authentos GmbH holding.

Growing system competence
In union with its partners and subsidiaries, Bundesdruckerei gradually expanded its system competence in the national and international markets for high-security technologies. In mid-2000, the company submitted a convincing and successful bid to the Federal Ministry of the Interior for the development of a new, multi-functional office ID card system. An agreement was signed with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office for the development of the DEPATIS patent information system. The number of international customers also grew in the banknote sector.

In November 2001, the Identigram® security feature developed by Bundesdruckerei was integrated into German ID documents for the first time. This feature significantly boosted forgery protection once again and German ID documents were now and still are considered to be the most secure world-wide.

That same year, at the world's biggest computer fair CeBIT, Bundesdruckerei presented for the first time its own border management system which works with biometric methods and the new smartcard technology.

The year 2002 was the year the euro was launched. Parallel to its banknote production working at full capacity, also supplying banknotes to Estonia and Luxembourg, Bundesdruckerei significantly expanded its international business ties for producing high-security ID documents. Romania and Albania commissioned Bundesdruckerei to produce their passports, Iceland ordered its driving licence cards online from Bundesdruckerei, and Romania also ordered several hundred thousand ID cards.

One the world's biggest ID projects on the horizon
In 2004, Bundesdruckerei presented the world's first draft passports which complied with the security standards recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The prototypes of this new electronic travel document featured a contactless processor chip in which, for instance, the biometric features of the face and the fingerprints of the document holder can be stored. The new ID cards in so-called ID1 card format additionally included a contact chip for electronic signatures. This marked an important step towards the introduction of the German ePassport.