Founded 2009.
Told through orders we remember.
Every entry below is sourced from a public record — the Cardzgroup news archive, LinkedIn company page, trade-press coverage, or sister-entity public listings. Where we cannot verify a claim from a public source we leave it out.
- 2009 Q1
Cardzgroup Ltd founded — Shenzhen.
Established by four Westerners — three with senior experience at Gemalto Europe, one with longstanding PVC card production experience inside China. Initial focus: PVC, smart card and RFID supply for Western integrators and distributors.
Source · FAQ + LinkedIn
- 2009 Jan
Blank self-adhesive cards added.
White self-adhesive cards in CR79 and CR80 formats, 0.36 mm to 0.76 mm thickness, designed for clamshell personalisation lines.
Source · cardzgroup.com news (Jan 2009)
- 2009 Jan
JCOP smart cards added.
Java Card Open Platform smart cards introduced into the product line — multi-application, dual-interface ready, suitable for issuance into transit, government and financial programmes.
Source · cardzgroup.com news (Jan 2009)
- 2009 Jan
1,000,000 PVC loyalty card win — South Africa.
Cardzgroup wins a tender for a 1,000,000-unit PVC loyalty card programme in South Africa.
Source · cardzgroup.com news (Jan 2009)
- 2009 Mar
NXP MIFARE DESFire EV1 release.
Contactless smartcards in 2k / 4k / 8k variants added — for transport, e-government and identity applications. Compliant with ISO/IEC 14443A and ISO/IEC 7816-4.
Source · cardzgroup.com news (Mar 2009)
- 2009 Mar
EM4200 read-only RF transponder added.
Replacement for the EM4100 / EM4102 / EM4005 / EM4105 generation of low-frequency tags. Direct read-only LF support for legacy access programmes.
Source · cardzgroup.com news (Mar 2009)
- 2009 Jun
Cardzgroup Africa opens — Johannesburg.
Regional sister entity opens in Johannesburg to grow share in loyalty, ID, telecoms and banking across Sub-Saharan Africa. The office is staffed by directors with deep banking-sector and printing-industry experience.
Source · cardzgroup.com news (Jun 2009)
- 2009 Oct
300,000 MIFARE Classic 1k order — Western European sport association.
Cardzgroup wins the rollout for a Western European sport association project, supplying 300,000 MIFARE Classic 1k contactless cards.
Source · cardzgroup.com news (Oct 2009)
- 2011 Jul
1,000,000th thermal-rewritable card produced.
A production milestone for thermal-rewritable card output is reached at the partner factory.
Source · cardzgroup.com (about page)
- 2018 Apr
Cardz Africa hires former HID Global / ASSA ABLOY engineering lead.
Cardz Africa expands its RFID secure-access-control offering by bringing on a former senior figure from HID Global, the access-control division of ASSA ABLOY.
Source · SMART Security Solutions (securitysa.com) — Aug 2018
- 2026 current
50M+ cards / year group output, 600M+ partner-network capacity.
Group-wide annual output exceeds 50 million cards per year. Partner-network production capacity exceeds 600 million cards per year. Cards now ship to more than thirty countries.
Source · cardzgroup.com / LinkedIn / FAQ
A first-year track record that most factories take a decade to build.
Reading the 2009 news archive in sequence, the pattern is clear: in its first year of operation the company delivered a million-unit South African loyalty win, set up a regional Africa office, added Java Card Open Platform support, rolled out NXP MIFARE DESFire EV1, added EM4200 LF support, and shipped 300,000 MIFARE Classic 1k cards into a Western European sport rollout.
That density of activity inside twelve months is the visible side of the founders' background — three of the four came in with senior Gemalto Europe experience already accumulated. They did not ramp from zero. They imported existing relationships, technical fluency and a customer-facing culture, and plugged it into a partner network of ISO-accredited Chinese factories that were ready to scale alongside them.
Today, more than fifteen years on, that same pattern still shapes the way Cardz China runs jobs: bilingual project managers, 100% inspection at every stage, SGS audit on request, consolidated through Hong Kong, shipped to more than thirty countries.