In the past two months, Ingenico received orders for 100,000 payment terminals — as many as the company sold there in all of 2004. Based on the IngeCore™ chip and the UNICAPT™ 32 platform, this order backlog is deliverable in the first half of 2005.

Turkey currently boasts a booming economy, with GDP growth of about 8 per cent in 2004. Transaction volume in 2004 was 36 percent higher than in 2003, totaling 1.1 billion. At the same time, the installed base of payment terminals grew to over 900,000 units, an increase of 38 per cent in relation to 2003. And there is still ample room for expansion, since only 20 to 25 per cent of all merchants in Turkey are equipped with payment terminals, operating in conjunction with the country's seven acquiring networks.

In addition to this buoyant market growth, the EMV migration process currently under way is encouraging banks to invest in upgrading their installed terminal base. As of early 2006, all bank transactions in the country will require the use of a PIN code. For this reason, the banks began in late 2004 to bring their payment systems up to date. This trend has picked up considerable steam recently with large-scale orders for new terminals and EMV Packs that can be connected up to existing payment terminals. Ingenico is ready to upgrade its installed base of 400,000 units in Turkey to ensure compliance with EMV.

Ingenico's new i Series has achieved global success. After a mere 18 months on the market, it accounts for 70 per cent of total equipment sales. This trend applies to Turkey as well. The i5100 countertop terminal and the EMV i3010 Pack have already won over the country's four leading banks: Disbank, Vakif Bank, Garanti Bank and Yapi Kredi.

Ingenico aims to benefit from the booming Turkish market and become the country's number one payment systems provider by late 2005 or early 2006.