The ILLIES Group is providing new passport lines to Asia for the production of state-of-the-art e-Passports.

Machine readable passports were introduced already in the 1980’s. After the terror attacks in the U.S. in 2001, the development of forgery-proof ID-documents was accelerated to the next level by widely introducing the biometric passport (also known as e-passport, ePassport, or digitized / electronic passport).

Actually, Malaysia started issuing the first biometric passports already back in 1998. By the year 2008 over 68 countries used this technology, and their number increased to over 170 countries by the end of 2024.

The primary reasons for worldwide growth in the use of ePassports are:

• More secure Identification of the passport holder

• Lower chances of forgery of biometric information stored in the passport

• Enhanced privacy protection

• Greater protection against identity theft

• Ease of handling entry and exit at border controls with automated passport readers

Only a few companies worldwide can manufacture machines for the production of e-passports. Prominently,
BW Papersystems (under the brand name Kugler-Womako) took on the challenge and by continuously improving the technical quality of their machines retained their market leader position until today.

ILLIES as the longtime exclusive representative of BW Papersystems in Japan and Korea has a deep expertise in the market for mass-production of security documents.

Together with expert engineers of BW Papersystems, ILLIES specialists could successfully map out the best possible technical answers for the challenges our customers were faced with, based on the stringent technical demands of their governments.

These challenges include the thick PC holder page in which the chip with the biometric data is contained, a monitoring systemand a top-notch track & trace system to control and warrant a flawless data exchange with existing production management systems. Needed expertise and know-how was available at BW Papersystems and the customer demand could be successfully translated into a reliable technical solution. That was the basis for several orders of complete e-passport lines that were installed recently.

Considering the additional burden of travel restrictions due to COVID-19, the installation and commissioning of the machines in 2020 made the successful start-up of production a special challenge. Our ILLIES team of engineers on site were perfectly supported by BW Papersystems engineers and jointly were able to bridge the gap and implement a smooth production ramp up. Our teams also guarantee customers a perfect after-sales service concept for stable production.

ILLIES takes pride in being the trusted partner of the industry's most discerning clients and is driven to achieve their complete satisfaction.