A French company won a tender to supply automatic machines for issuing automatic metro tickets, said the Egyptian National Authority for Tunnels (NAT). The machines will cover the stations of the first and second lines completely, and operate with coin, and paper currencies and bank credit cards. The NAT's main decision committee had completed the evaluation and examination of the technical and financial offers submitted for the limited tender that the authority had put forward to select a specialised international firm to manufacture and supply automatic metro ticket issuance machines (TVM) for the three line stations in full. The evaluation work resulted in winning the bid of the French company Revenues Collection Systems France SAS. The French company's tender to supply new machines, worth 76 million pounds, won after a competition with the Spanish company Andra Systems, which obtained a lower technical evaluation and submitted a financial offer of 85 million pounds. The company, to whom the offer was awarded, supplies automatic metro ticket-issuance machines for the first and second line stations, as part of the plan to install automatic metro ticket issuance machines in all three lines' stations, as it had previously contracted to purchase 50 TVM machines for the third line stations, and the first batches were installed in the fourth phase stations of the third line of the metro from Haroun station to Adly Mansour station. The new machines will be used by the passenger in extracting metro tickets automatically instead of resorting to standing in front of the ticket counters, and they are similar to the "ATM" machines for banks, and they work using paper and coin currencies besides bank credit cards, and through these machines the passenger can extract single-trip tickets or charge the smart card on which subscriptions are charged or used as a cash wallet for the metro's independence as an alternative to paper tickets.
