Sumitomo Corporation and NEC Corporation have received a bulk order for systems to renew all of the automatic mail sorting machines currently being operated by Hongkong Post, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Sumitomo will be the prime contractor of the project worth approximately 3.5 billion yen, NEC will manufacture, deliver, and install the equipment, and local companies will be used to remove existing equipment and refurbish postal offices. The new machines will be supplied from April 2008, and will gradually replace existing machines. All of the new systems will commence operation at the beginning of 2009.

In 1989, Sumitomo and NEC delivered 20 automatic mail sorting machines to Hongkong Post. These machines are currently in operation at the two central post offices, the General Post Office (Hong Kong) and the International Mail Centre Post Office (Kowloon), and eight delivery offices. Hongkong Post has decided to introduce 11 sophisticated automatic sorting machines at the two central offices to consolidate the systems, raise the efficiency of mail sorting, and minimize costs. This decision was partly taken as the contractual period of the obligation to supply service parts expired last year.

The new mail sorting machines to be delivered by Sumitomo and NEC will be able to sort more than 40,000 pieces of mail per hour and are approximately 30% more efficient than the existing machines. Hongkong Post has not introduced a postcode system, and therefore both hand-written and printed addresses need to be read very accurately. The introduction of the centralized optical character reader (OCR *1) and video coding system (VCS *2) that adopts an open interface based on European Committee for Standardization (CEN) standards (*3) will deliver high performance, reliability, and scalability.

NEC's automatic mail sorting systems incorporate industry-leading, cutting-edge technology, which brings added value to our clients, enabling more productive and cost efficient systems. NEC has already delivered sophisticated OCR system with full address reading performance to New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, and Brazil, and aims to increase its global share through the supply of unmatched solutions and services.

In regions other than Hong Kong, Sumitomo has handled communications infrastructure projects, for example, the sale of equipment for communication satellites in China and Russia, and the sale of wireless communication equipment for mobile phone companies in Asia and the Middle East, and remains committed to these fields.

* Notes
1) Optical character reader: A system that reads the full page of a piece of mail with a scanner, recognizes the characters in the address part of the scanned image, and identifies the address by checking against a registered address database.
2) Video coding system: A system that displays scanned images of pieces of mail whose addresses cannot be recognized by OCR so that operators can type the addresses using a keyboard.
3) CEN standards: CEN was established in 1961 with the participation of standardization organizations of 18 European nations. Since 1982, CEN, which is in charge of non-electrical areas, and CENELEC, which is in charge of electrical areas, have collectively fulfilled the mission.