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NFC handsets surpass 30m units

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 29 Mar 2012

NFC handsets surpass 30m units

Around 100 million cellphones using near field communication (NFC) chips will be sold this year, with sales more than tripling from a year ago, according to research firm Berg Insight, Reuters Canada reports.

Handset vendors released more than 40 NFC-enabled models in 2011, hoping to tap emerging markets for mobile payments.

Berg Insight claims global sales of handsets featuring NFC increased 10-fold in 2011 to 30 million units, and growth is set to explode over the next five years, to 700 million units, on the back of compound annual growth of 87.8%, iTWire states.

NFC can be used for applications such as pairing devices to establish Bluetooth or WLAN connections, information exchange, electronic ticketing and secure contactless payments.

Berg Insight senior analyst Andr'e Malm says in a Total Telecom report: "Even though it will take some time before the stakeholders agree on business models for [NFC] payment networks, other use cases such as reading tags and easy pairing of devices may well be compelling enough for handset vendors to integrate NFC in mid- and high-end devices today.”

Although business models and ecosystems are still being established, the prevailing view is that NFC will be used principally for payments.

Juniper Research predicts that the total transaction value of NFC payments will treble by 2015 to reach $74 billion.

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