SMAC Vietnam plants make digital pens for Sweden’s Anoto

South Korea-based Smart Mobile Application Company (SMAC) has signed a production agreement with Anoto Group to make digital pens for the Swedish company, Anoto said Monday.

Both sides did not disclose the value of the deal. However, cloud-based software provider Anoto said SMAC would be producing all Anoto and Livescribe pens under the agreement starting on October 1, 2022.

SMAC is headquartered in Gyeonggi-do, Korea’s most populous province, and has three manufacturing plants, all in Vietnam.

“With this contract, Anoto will be free from manufacturing issues such as procurement, managing yields, quality control of hardware, and even scaling of production,” Anoto CEO Joonhee Won said in a release from Stockholm.

“SMAC is capable of producing more than 100,000 pens a month, in case we need to scale up our production level. Also, this is going to alleviate working capital issues as Anoto no longer has to buy components up front,” Won said.

The Anoto and Livescribe digital pens are products with a combination of an ordinary ink pen, a digital camera and supporting hardware that digitally records things written with the pens. They work by recognizing a non-repeating dot pattern printed on the paper.

SMAC's Vietnam plants include SMAC Vina in Bac Ninh province, responsible for touch module development and production; ESSA Hi-Tech in Ha Nam, with its main business being sensor inspection and LED indoor and outdoor lighting; and SMAC HT Vina, also in Ha Nam, which makes automotive LED lighting modules, all in northern Vietnam.

The manufacturing facilities employ more than 1,000 workers, said Anoto. It is traded on the Small Cap list of Nasdaq Stockholm under ANOT.