IN Groupe Acquires Portals Technology Business in Italy

IN Groupe, global specialist in identities and digital services and owner of SURYS, has announced that it has signed an agreement with UK-based Portals for the sale of papermaker Portals’ security components business in Bollate, Italy.

The sale of the Italian part of the business is the latest chapter in Portal’s story. Having taken the business out from parent De La Rue in 2018, the business experienced strong head winds and saw a significant adverse impact on its banknote paper business. It became clear that the change in the fortunes and priorities of De La Rue, still its largest customer, and the rising input costs, specifically of energy, set against the increasingly price competitive banknote paper marketplace, meant that its banknote paper business at Overton was no longer viable.

Plans for an orderly wind down of Overton were triggered in July 2022, and the closure has now been completed.

Earlier, in November 2021, Portals had completed the acquisition of Fedrigoni’s security business. Fedrigoni is one of the leading European producers of specialty papers and high value-added products for packaging, graphics and self-adhesive labels.

The security business, formerly known as Fabriano, specialises in the production of security features for the global banknote, passport and high security documents markets – in particular security threads, holographic stripes and patches.

One of the first developments following that acquisition was the launch of Motus™, in May 2022, a micro-optics security thread designed to offer central banks an alternative to Crane Currency’s MOTION® thread.

IN Groupe (formerly known as Imprimerie Nationale) is owned by the French government and specialises in identity and secured digital services, serving more than 130 countries in the world. In addition to its solutions dedicated to legal and professional identity security, IN Groupe develops and sells security components for identities and banknotes through SURYS (optical components), which it acquired in 2019 and was formerly known as Hologram.Industries, and SPS (electronic components).

SURYS already offers a number of diffractive and nano-structured optical features, available as patches and stripes, for both paper and polymer banknotes. They include the Alphagram™, as used for the patch on the first euro series, the colour shifting zero order device DID™, the Plasmogram™, based on plasmonic technology, with a variant for polymer and Moov™ an animated colour shifting features based on micro- and nano-structures. The Moov technology also underpins the company's TriSTAR™ range of recently-launched security threads. Banknote references include the Philippines, Sudan, Poland and Kazakhstan, among others.

According to SURYS CEO Frederic Trojani, ‘this acquisition will increase our expertise and capability to develop new innovative security features to address the identity and banknote markets, including threads, foils and patches. We are proud to welcome our Italian colleagues to serve even better our worldwide customers’.

The acquisition is part of the implementation of the Digital Odyssey 2025 Plan and the complementary nature of the SURYS site in Bussy-Saint-Georges (France) with the new site in Bollate will strengthen IN Groupe’s products portfolio to meet the needs of the eurozone and export markets. The transaction is expected to complete during the first half of 2023, subject to customary approvals.