WISeKey Ramps Up Semiconductors and Blockchain Operation in China

 WISeKey Ramps Up Semiconductors and Blockchain Operation in China

WISeKey IoT has an install base of over 1.2 billion secure chips (since 2010) in virtually all IoT sectors – autonomous cars, smart cities, drones, anti-counterfeiting, smart lighting, servers, mobile phones, etc.

WISeKey International Holding Ltd (“WISeKey” or the “Company”) (SIX: WIHN) (OTCQX: WIKYY), a leading cybersecurity and IoT company, today announced that is joining the 2018 Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin. More than 2,000 leaders from government, business, science and civil society will join the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, People’s Republic of China, taking place on 18-20 September 2018. 111 countries will be represented.

WISeKey was originally nominated as one of the founding members of the New Champions community back in 2007 in China with already 12 years of deep engagement with the Forum as member of its Expert Network and member of the PACI, Cyber Resilience and Global Agenda Council. During the past years, the New Champions event in China has provided an excellent platform for WISeKey to exchange insights and practices with multi-stakeholders in China, which has greatly accelerated our WISeKey China operations.

The main objective of Summer Davos is to create a global community to ensure that emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and the internet of things are used to benefit society and that they remain human-centered. This requires global collaborative efforts to define the necessary principles of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the standards to ensure global interoperability.

WISeKey has already started the localization of the its IoT semiconductors in China, having as a goal the ramp up of its secure chip install base to 10 billion within the next 3 years, with a new Secure Microprocessor for IoT, Blockchain, AI and WISeCoin.  WISeKey IoT has an install base of over 1.2 billion secure chips (since 2010) in virtually all IoT sectors – autonomous cars, smart cities, drones, anti-counterfeiting, smart lighting, servers, mobile phones, etc. VaultIC407 features an outstandingly rich set of Security Protocols and Security Functions tailored to IoT applications. While WISeKey will continue manufacturing chips in other countries in Asia and Europe, its new plant in China will become the main manufacturing center for Asia.

WISeKey China has the goal of becoming one of the leading providers of Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain services for the growing Chinese market. The over-arching objective of the new company is to establish a market foothold with credible in-country leaders to maximize revenue in the near-term and realize reputable category position in the sectors of: retail, financial transaction, automotive, smart cities, consumer products, healthcare, smart card, industrial, transportation, and IT infrastructure, in the long-term.

Trusted Semiconductors are the building blocks of the IoT, found in everything from autonomous cars, smart cities, drones, anti-counterfeiting, smart lighting, servers, mobile phones, etc. Although China has mastered the art of assembling products with semiconductors produced elsewhere (the iPhone is the most famous example), the aspiration is for technology companies in China to move from being mere assemblers to manufacturers of semiconductors, therefore there is huge opportunity for WISeKey to become one of the first global companies to establish its semiconductors manufacturing facility in mainland China.

The world is beginning to feel the effects of the explosive development of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a driving force for social development, powering industrial transformation: smart cities, transportation, finance, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, smart home or consumer electronics, and offering the potential for Communications Service Providers to capture new services and revenue – estimated to reach 15 billion connections by 2020, and over $2 trillion in overall market revenue.

China has the world’s fastest rate of growth in total IoT connections. By 2020, the number of IoT connections in the country alone will reach 8 billion. An estimated 1.08 billion of these connections will be delivered over cellular networks. China’s trying to reduce a reliance on some $200 billion of annual semiconductor imports, which it fears undermines national security and hampers the development of a thriving technology sector. The country envisions spending about $150 billion over 10 years to achieve a leading position in design and manufacturing

This is a great revenue opportunity for WISeKey as China is currently the world’s largest chip market, but it manufactures only 16 percent of the semiconductors it uses domestically. Currently, China imports about $200 billion worth of chips annually – a value exceeding its oil imports. To cultivate a domestic industry, the government of China has slashed taxes for chip makers and plans to invest as much as $32 billion to become a world leader in design and manufacturing.

To take advantage of these opportunities in China, WISeKey made the strategic decision to localize the production of VAULTIC, a Vault in a secure Integrated Circuit. Combined with the Application Microcontroller in the IoT Edge Device, VaultIC407 brings premium security level. WISeKey Secure Elements provide secure storage and usage of sensitive assets. The firmware running on the WISeKey chips, is built with unique features able to secure storage, cryptographic calculations and digital signatures, and is specifically designed to execute sensitive calculations, without leaking information such as power consumption patterns or electromagnetic emissions to the outside world. The data is stored deep down within the protected memory of the chips, which are designed with unique capabilities not to allow other software to run on them and are equipped with various hardware sensors and protection mechanisms making them resistant to hardware attacks. Of note, would these WISeKey Secure Elements have been used for sensitive data storage for the Application Microcontrollers affected by the recent ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ attacks, they would have never been successful.

For more than twenty years, WISeKey has been providing a range of Common Criteria certified tamper resistant microprocessors that can be implemented on IoT devices to provide secure storage and usage of sensitive assets, and to uniquely identify, authenticate and protect devices in the field. These assets can be managed through a Webtrust certified Public Key Infrastructure on premises or as an operated service. 

WISeKey Semiconductors has been busy developing the latest VaultIC407 Secure Microprocessor enabling the new secure chip to be deployed in all business areas.  WISeKey IoT has an install base of over 1.2 billion VaultIC chips in virtually all IoT sectors (smartcards, smart cities, drones, anti-counterfeiting, smart lighting, servers, mobile phones, etc.). 

WISeKey is uniquely positioned to be at the edge of IoT as VaultIC semiconductors produce a huge amount of Big Data that, when analyzed with Artificial Intelligence (AI), can help industrial applications to predict the failure of their equipment before it happens.  Imagine an intelligent car with a system processing authenticated data for each of the vehicle’s components, being able to detect if/when various parts will require service and to digitally sign all the logs required to prove that service was provided. This platform can be used in multiple industrial applications, allowing for optimized productivity across industries through predictive maintenance on equipment and machinery, creating truly smart homes with connected appliances, and providing critical communication between devices including self-driving cars and smart homes. The possibilities that IoT brings to the table are endless. WISeKey’s technology creates a platform that helps connected devices to become intelligent devices that can learn from attacks, defend themselves, and transfer this intelligence to other devices in the network.

About WISeKey:

WISeKey (SIX: WIHN) (OTCQX: WIKYY) is a leading global cybersecurity company currently deploying via a Virtual Platform large scale digital identity ecosystems. WISeKey’s Swiss based cryptographic Root of Trust (“RoT”) and IoT Microchips provide secure authentication and identification, in both physical and virtual environments, for the Internet of Things, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. The WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor to ensure the integrity of online transactions among objects and between objects and people. For more information, visit www.wisekey.com.

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