Three from Gemalto Europe
Three of the four founders previously held senior roles at Gemalto Europe (now Thales DIS) — one of the largest names in smart card manufacturing globally.
About
A Western card factory operation, in Shenzhen, since 2009.
Cardz China is the manufacturing arm of the Cardzgroup family. We were founded by four Westerners — three with senior backgrounds at Gemalto Europe, one with longstanding PVC card experience inside China — to do one specific thing: bring European card-manufacturing know-how to the cost base, scale and engineering depth of South China.
The brief
Western quality. Chinese cost base. One floor.
When the founders set up Cardzgroup, the standard offering for Western buyers was a binary choice: pay European factory pricing for European-grade output, or save money in Asia and accept that artwork and quality would be translated and re-translated through chains of agents.
Our job is to remove that choice. Cardz China runs a single, Western-managed production floor inside the partner network the founders built up. Customers speak to bilingual project managers. Specs go directly to the operator. Every order is inspected 100% — every card, every step — by full-time Cardzgroup staff stationed at each partner factory. SGS audit can be arranged from our Shenzhen office for any customer who wants third-party verification before ship.
The team behind the floor Founders In-China Group
Engineering pedigree out of Gemalto, Australian sector, and South African telco.
One PVC-China veteran
The fourth founder brought direct, longstanding PVC card production experience inside China — the operational counterweight to the European pedigree.
Sister-company expertise
Senior management across the Cardzgroup family includes UK and Australian smart-card sector experience and South African telco/access-control depth (via Cardz Africa).
We list role and pedigree, not individual names, on this page; for live introductions to the people behind a project, brief us via the contact form and we will route you to the right English-speaking PM.
How we sit in the group CORPORATE MANUFACTURING · YOU ARE HERE CORPORATE / LOGISTICS REGIONAL · SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA REGIONAL · UK REGIONAL · PAKISTAN
Cardz China is one of five Cardzgroup entities. Each does a different job.
Cardzgroup Ltd
The corporate top of the family. cardzgroup.com handles group-level customer relationships and the published news archive.
Cardz China
The Shenzhen manufacturing arm. Production management, partner-factory oversight, in-house personalisation bureau, SGS coordination.
Cardz Hong Kong
The HKSAR corporate face and primary logistics hub. All goods consolidate in Hong Kong before air or sea shipment worldwide.
Cardz Africa
Cape Town and Johannesburg. Established June 2009. Local sales and support for loyalty, ID, telecoms, banking and (since 2018) RFID access control.
Cardzgroup UK
Northern-hemisphere customer interface for European integrators. Two of the four founding directors are based here.
Cardzgroup Pakistan
South-Asia regional office.
A short note on the way we do not work.
We do not sell finished cards to end users. Our customers are integrators, distributors and brand-owners — the businesses whose product lines need card supply at scale and who would rather a Western team sit between them and the factory floor.
We do not invent customer references. Where we list a sector, a technology, or a milestone, it is because that line of business is part of the Cardzgroup track record, traceable to the published group news archive, our LinkedIn presence, and trade-press coverage.
We do not pretend to be a single-site factory. Cardzgroup runs through four partner factories, each ISO-accredited and each with full-time Cardzgroup staff on-site. The visible Western face is the project management; the manufacturing depth is the partner network.