Producer
De La Rue plc
World's largest commercial banknote printer and security-paper maker (cotton/abaca currency paper).
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1 input De La Rue plc supplies
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Currency
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Did you know2024
The radar found De La Rue, the world's largest banknote printer, through a teabag. That's because banknote paper and teabag paper are made from the same fiber: abaca (Manila hemp), whose exceptionally long, strong fibers give both the tea bag its wet-strength and the banknote its tear-and-fold durability. So the humble teabag and the cash in your wallet share a raw material — abaca, grown mainly in the Philippines and Ecuador. One niche tropical fiber underlies both the bag that holds your tea and cotton-and-abaca currency paper. It's a perfect example of an invisible material connecting two utterly unrelated everyday objects, and of how concentrated a "boring" natural fiber's sourcing can be: abaca supply is geographically narrow, so a typhoon or a plant disease in Philippine abaca can ripple into both tea bags and the world's currency paper at once. The money in your pocket and the brew in your cup are, at the fiber level, cousins.
De La Rue plc ↗Concentration2024
De La Rue is the world's largest commercial banknote printer — a single private UK company that prints the sovereign currency of around 140 countries, many of which lack their own secure printworks and outsource the printing of their money. So the cash circulating across much of the world comes off the presses of one company (with a few peers like Giesecke+Devrient and Crane). Money itself — the thing a state most jealously controls — is, for many nations, made by an outside contractor. And De La Rue's fortunes are now threatened by the decline of cash (it has issued going-concern warnings) and by losing high-profile contracts, including Britain's post-Brexit blue passport, which went to a Franco-Dutch firm to be produced partly in the EU — a famous irony, the symbol of reclaimed British sovereignty made on the continent. So the maker of money sits at the crossroads of sovereignty, the cashless transition and identity politics, its very survival tied to whether the world still wants physical money and printed passports at all.
De La Rue plc ↗