De La Rue Authentication on Track to Exceed £100 Million in Revenue

De La Rue has announced that its Authentication division is on track to exceed £100 million in revenue for fiscal year 2024, demonstrating good growth versus 2023 results, and making it the fastest growing division in the company.

The Authentication division provides physical and digital solutions to governments and commercial organisations for protecting revenues and brand reputations. The division also manufactures ID security components.

De La Rue reported total revenue for FY23 of £349.7 million (down from £375.1 million for FY22). While revenue from its Currency division was 9.4% lower, at £254.6 million (following an industry-wide downturn in activity in this sector), Authentication achieved a modest increase of 1.6%, to reach £91.7 million.

This healthy growth in Authentication is, in large part, attributed to:

• The company’s Government Revenue Solutions (GRS) scheme coming into operation in Bahrain, Qatar and Oman. With these latest schemes on board, De La Rue now runs GRS programmes across five of the six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council area – with the two other countries being United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The schemes use a combination of physical tax stamps and directly printed pack codes on tobacco products.

• A full year of contribution from polycarbonate data pages manufactured for the new Australian passport.

Offsetting these achievements were:

• Lower personal computer sales globally, which impacted De La Rue’s sales of physical and digital brand protection technologies to Microsoft, with whom it has a longstanding contract.

• The end of a contract with HM Revenue & Customs, UK’s tax authority, for the provision of a tobacco track and trace system.

• A falling away of COVID-19 vaccine brand protection seals.

Over the last five years, the company’s authentication and traceability business has increased by almost 200%, driven by robust GRS and brand protection growth, as well as by several strategic investments to expand its portfolio of physical and digital security solutions.

In 2017, De La Rue partnered with Opalux, a Canadian authentication firm, to explore Opalux’s tunable photonic crystal technology for the identity market. This was followed by a partnership with Optel, a market leader in track and trace technology. The acquisition of DuPont Authentication also brought Lippman hologram technology into De La Rue’s portfolio, which it provides in the identity and product authentication sectors.