The Finnish National Railway VR Ltd. is in the process of renewing its ticketing system and has made Almex its supplier of choice. Together with its local partner Enfo Oyj, Almex plans to supply the Finnish state-owned railway with 900 almex.mobile ticket vending devices for train attendants. Almex, the ticketing division of Höft & Wessel AG, had already supplied the successful predecessor version. In future, the almex.mobile will enable train attendants to use technologically sophisticated communication facilities such as GPRS, WLAN and Bluetooth, for instance to allow passengers to pay for their tickets online. Delivery of the devices is scheduled to commence in 2008.
Apart from the compelling performance of the solution on offer, the decisive reason for choosing Almex once again as a supplier was the positive experience gained in the course of their mutual collaboration in the past. The Finnish National Railway is already the fourth European state-owned railway corporation to choose the almex.mobile for nationwide coverage, along with its Austrian, Swiss and Slovakian counterparts.
Höft & Wessel AG, Hanover, established by the entrepreneurs of the same name in 1978, has remained an innovative SME to this day. The company, which has been listed on the stock market since 1998, provides enterprises of note in the retail, logistics, transport & traffic sectors with products and solutions optimised to meet customers’ specific needs: convenient, mobile data recording devices of the Skeye brand, innovative ticket systems under the Almex label and robust car park ticket vending machines from the UK subsidiary, Metric. Well over a third of the Company's workforce of about 500 employees is engaged in research and development. An average of ten per cent of sales revenues is invested in this field each year. Höft & Wessel products are available in Germany as well as in many European markets, and, in line with the company's internationalisation strategy, increasingly also in the U.S.
