The Changing Face of the Tax Stamp Field

The authors of the third edition of Tax Stamps & Traceability: A Market Analysis and Technical Update (TSR 3), published by Reconnaissance International in 2020, estimated that there were then ‘about 80 prime contractors for tax stamp programmes around the world’, of which 50 were commercial organisations and 30 state-owned enterprises. Those state-owned entities mainly supplied their own country’s tax stamp requirements, but many were also operating commercially on the open market, albeit primarily supplying regional neighbours.

Most of those commercial organisations were well-established high-security printers (ie. printers of government-issued documents such as banknotes and identity documents), or other security printers, or suppliers of consumables (ink, holograms etc.) for security documents, all of which had turned to tax stamp production as the market grew rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s.

These security printers had established customers for security documents across the world, many of them in regions of earlier colonial influence, so they initially focused their efforts for tax stamp contracts on these customers. As they won customers for tax stamps in these areas where they were known security document suppliers, they were then able to use this portfolio of successes to leverage other markets around the world.