Thales Group Member Gemalto to Supply Thai Citizens with 15 Million Innovative e-Passports

It was announced on August 27, 2019, that the Thales Group had secured the tender to supply approximately 15 million cutting-edge e-passports over a seven-year period, in line with the Thai government’s “Thailand 4.0” initiative to achieve a contemporary and technologically advanced economy. The contract, supplied by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of Thailand, is one of the largest passport projects for the Thales Group this year.

With a flexible data page constructed from polycarbonate that holds 64 pages and contains a traveler’s biometric information, the modern Thai e-passport will comply with the highest standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Thai citizens will experience streamlined international travel owing to the new e-passports’ secure, embedded software and its integration with a secure end-to-end backend system, compliant with Thailand’s national data protection laws. Thales will also seek to improve the enrollment process for Thai citizens, providing greater efficiency through the upgrading of 22 existing enrollment sites and the deployment of a further 15 sites.

Since 2016, Thailand has been overhauling its fundamental socioeconomic foundations and establishing an economy based on innovation, research, and development—a move away from traditional manufacturing. Dubbed “Thailand 4.0,” the movement is preceded by Thailand 1.0 (with a focus on agriculture), 2.0 (light industry), and 3.0 (heavy industry). Now as part of Thailand 4.0, the government is looking to establish an economic model achieving

• Economic prosperity
• Social wellbeing
• Raised human values
• Envrionmental Protection

As part of this development, in 2018 the Thai government announced a push toward modern digital identification. Taking the form of a centralized identity platform, the nationwide backend identity database will contain ID data from all departments, including ID credential applications and biometric information. The information will be accessible by medical and financial institutions to streamline citizen interactions with national infrastructure and will reduce the risk of fraud and identity theft through increased digital security. The digital ID push has been inspired by contemporary identity programs in other areas, such as the SingPass mobile identity in Singapore, which improves citizen-to-government and government-to-citizen interaction through fingerprint-accessed e-government services. For a country looking to capitalize on the development of modern digital identities, Thailand could see a mobile counterpart being deployed to the upcoming digital ID program that is similar to the Singapore model.

The global e-passport market is looking healthy, with a number of programs issuing credentials or nearly ready to do so in the coming years. The Thailand e-passport project and the 15 million credentials to be issued will prosper beyond the five-year forecast period. Growth in the Asia-Pacific e-passport market is already strong; there were 59.8 million shipments in 2017 followed by 70.2 million shipments in 2018, a Year-over-Year (YoY) growth of 17%. With the announcement of the Thailand e-passport program, shipments will rise further to a forecast of 86.6 million units in 2019—a YoY growth of 23%.

Not only does the Thailand e-passport program support healthy growth in the regional market, as seen in Table 1 and ABI Research's Government and Healthcare ID Cards (MD-GHSC-22) Market Data, but the development of digital identity in Thailand and other regions in the Asia-Pacific, such as Malaysia (National Digital Identity) and Singapore (SingPass), could see market growth for mobile identities as well. Understandably, it is far easier to issue a mobile counterpart to a physical credential when there is a preexisting centralized database containing citizen information; all the government needs to do now is to create a secure point to allow citizens to access e-government services and transfer the document to handheld devices. The region has growing smartphone penetration rates, and so the required form factors already exist for governments and solutions providers to use.