Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Egis Projects for Its Extraordinary Growth and Innovative Contributions to the Intelligent Transport Systems Industry

LONDON, April 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent research on the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) market, Frost & Sullivan presents Egis Projects with the '2009 Global Electronic Toll Collection Growth Leadership Award'. Through its inclusiveness in technology, operation and maintenance, Egis Projects has been successful in delivering complex road pricing projects around the world and being a pivotal member in public private partnership (PPP) projects in Ireland, the UK, France, Greece, Canada and the Philippines. The company demonstrates dedication and a strong determination to establish itself as a key road user charging provider and a leading player in the intelligent transport systems industry.

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The key challenge faced by the ETC market concerns availability of ample investment. New installations of ETC systems require heavy up front investments and, in a market where there are political uncertainties, justifying the need for investment can be difficult. Public opinion concerning toll fares will always be a challenge to road charging. The government's ability to sell the concept of toll collection is very important.

"Egis Projects has established itself as the leading provider of value-added services that is critical for the ETC market to sustain, consolidate and increase user patronage for ETC systems," says Harish Baskar, Research Associate, Frost & Sullivan. "This has fulfilled Egis Projects' aim to create market differentiation in a crowded ETC market."

Egis Projects has strong expertise as an operator. Currently, the company has 1550 km of motorways under operation, the latest one being the M6 motorway in Hungary opened in March 2010. The majority of the roads it operates are outside France, which makes Egis Projects a successful global player when compared with other large operators.

Through its different operating subsidiaries, Egis Projects now has more than 900,000 ETC tags distributed in Europe, Asia and North America. In parallel, Egis Projects has developed a pure toll service provider activity under the Easytrip brand, which is already active in Ireland and the Philippines. Easytrip is the typical example of the European Electronic Toll Service provider as described in the EU Directive issued in October 2009.

Egis Projects is one of the original sponsors behind Transurban that secured the contract for the design, construction, financing and operation of the Melbourne City Link, one of the first successful open road tolling projects in the world. In May 2009, it won as part of Connect Plus Services the contract for the operation and maintenance of the 400 km M25 motorway project in the United Kingdom. This contract includes the operation of the Dartford toll plaza, comprising ETC collection and handling with approximately 150,000 vehicles per day and toll revenue of more than euro 90 million per year.

One of the other successful projects is Vancouver's Golden Ears Bridge free flow tolling project in service from July 2009, where Egis Projects played a key part in the consortium with estimated annual revenue of euro 42 million. Currently, this project has more than 75,000 tag and video subscribing customers, and more than 400,000 occasional customers.

"Although Egis Projects entered the market as an operator, it has successfully implemented the back office systems, which involved the customer relations management and billing to system integration," notes Baskar.

The company has established a strong position in the domain of electronic toll interoperability by having been awarded in 2004 the design, implementation and operation of Ireland's national electronic toll collection clearing house. Through this Information Exchange Agent project, Egis Projects has achieved national interoperability across Ireland by integrating 12 different toll infrastructure providers, thus contributing to the European wide interoperable service concept. This interoperability scheme is the first example of an ETC scheme consistent with the European Electronic Toll Service (EETS) Directive.

Egis Projects also has unique know-how in terms of building up a toll and traffic management system. The company has developed several user-friendly websites, which deal with customer services and points of sales of its tags even in supermarkets to simplify tolling (Please read: www.easytrip.ph, www.easytrip.ie ). It has broad expertise in tunnel operation and has experts in consulting who ensure that the most appropriate technology and services are implemented for traffic management and operations. With over 15 years of experience in operations and maintenance, its experts are critical at the local operational offices around the globe.

Overall, Egis Projects deserve recognition among its competitors in terms of the extended list of implemented projects and services it has provided to its customers and is the worthy recipient of the '2009 Global Electronic Toll Collection Growth Leadership Award'. Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to a company that has demonstrated excellence in capturing the highest annual compound growth rate for the last 3 years.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.

About Egis Projects

Egis Projects is a leading toll road operator and service provider in Europe. Egis Projects benefits from the vast engineering expertise of its mother company, Egis (euro 563 million), in various transportation infrastructure projects and has its presence in more than 90 countries. Egis Projects is one of the first companies to design, build, finance and operate an open road tolling project with no toll plazas in the Melbourne city link in Australia and the Golden Ears Bridge free flow project in Canada. In addition to being one of the top ten road operators in Europe, it is also one of the world's leading players in the field of operations in terms of the whole back office environment and the integration across multiple platforms for the road side systems. Egis Projects manages more than 900,000 customers owning OBUs/tags for electronic tolling around the world. For more information, please visit www.egis-projects.com.

About Frost & Sullivan

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SOURCE Frost & Sullivan