According to reports, China's largest chip maker Tsinghua Unigroup (Unigroup) plans to acquire French smart card device manufacturer Linxens for about 2.2 billion euros. The contract between the two parties has been signed and is currently awaiting the consent of the French and German regulators and the company's trade unions.

Although the above transaction has been signed for more than a month, neither side has responded to this.

It is understood that Linxens was founded in 1979 and is headquartered in Paris, producing connectors that are critical to smart card and e-reader communications. Linxens also produces antenna and smart card pre-lamination products (inlays) for applications such as contactless payment and access. According to reports, Linxens has annual sales of 535 million euros and employs 3,500 people at nine production sites around the world. In addition, the company is a world-class provider of component-based solutions for the security and authentication markets, including RFID, biometrics, secure identity, dLoc, etc., for financial, Internet of Things, communications, transportation, and medical applications. And other fields.

According to the prediction of foreign research institutions, by 2019, the network security market is expected to grow to 155.74 billion US dollars, of which the identity authentication information security market will exceed 30 billion US dollars.

Currently, Unigroup and Linxens have not made any statement on the merger, but this will be Unicon's first successful overseas acquisition in the past two years.