“The NFC market has encountered many false dawns from its inception almost seven years ago,” comments Senior Market Analyst Don Tait. “The launch of a number of NFC-enabled smart phones in 2011 is helping the market to gain traction. Also, use of NFC-enabled phones for payment, mass transit & ticketing and access is projected to boost market development over the next few years.”
The UK-based research firm, which today issued a survey on the NFC, secure payments and digital security markets, projects that the number of NFC-enabled devices and credentials shipped (particularly NFC-enabled handsets) will increase dramatically in the next five years to reach 920 million units in 2015.
According to Tait, it has taken a number of years to resolve some of the major issues surrounding NFC, including a lack of available handsets, a shortage of contactless terminals, limited infrastructure to support the technology, unclear business models and disagreements between different stakeholders of the ecosystem. Tait says most of these issues are being resolved and have improved significantly over the year.
“NFC is not the only secure digital sector that is forecast to experience good growth in the next few years,” Tait adds. “Payment and banking cards are also projected to show good growth over the next five years with shipments reaching 2.65 billion in 2015. Smart card shipments in the payment and banking sector are to be considerably boosted by People’s Bank of China’s decision to convert all payment cards into smart cards by 2015. The payment and banking sector is forecast to be driven by the migration towards EMV and contactless deployments.”
Tait continues, “Digital security solutions (including conditional access, government and health care ID, physical access control and M2M) are projected to increase from around 600 million units in 2010 to over 1.2 billion units in 2014. National ID is estimated to be by far the largest potential application within the government & health care ID sector. Asia is the largest contributor to this, accounting for over half the national ID cards in circulation.
