Out of a
total of 552 million NFC handsets shipped in 2016, 227 million will feature
multiple secure elements. The increased inclusion of multiple secure elements
will drive the mobile NFC market valuation above the $1 billion mark.

Though MNOs
favor SWP SIM implementation, the market will develop with both SWP and
embedded solutions shipping onto single devices. Continued development of ICs
combining both controller and secure element will result in most handsets
shipping with an embedded solution as standard practice.

ABI Research
forecasts that 78 percent of all NFC handsets will ship with some form of
embedded secure solution in 2016.

“The issues
affecting the location of the secure element remain a hot topic and although
progress has been made there remains uncertainty among ecosystem players,” said
Research analyst Phil Sealy.

As the
market matures and business models are realized and deployed, a variety of
secure elements are being deployed into devices to meet different client
demands. In the long run, this will allow service providers to enter the NFC
market alongside MNOs, in turn making the offerings of NFC applications more
competitive.

As well as
the well-publicized NFC handset market, lesser known sectors, such as CE
devices, tags, bridging solutions, and other markets will account for
additional IC shipments totaling 534 million in 2016.

NFC will be
an extremely prosperous market for IC vendors, generating estimated revenues
totaling $1.3 billion in 2016 in the handset market alone.

“The ongoing
uncertainly over secure elements and ownership will drive IC vendors to develop
a variety of competitive solutions, including integrating the NFC RF in a combo
connectivity IC or the baseband, embedding the secure element and controller
together, as well as standalone solutions. This will enable a number of
business models to develop and be served, meeting the anticipated long-term
market requirement to support more than one secure element in a device,” said
John Devlin, group director, security and ID.

By
Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]