NICE, France – A planning chief for Samsung Electronics’ mobile business said consumer awareness of NFC remains a major problem, even in such markets as South Korea, where tens of millions of NFC-enabled phones are already in the pockets of consumers.
Hankil Yoon, senior vice president of product strategy for Samsung’s mobile communication business, speaking this week at the NFC World Congress in Nice, also warned companies rolling out NFC not to be too “greedy” and to avoid charging consumers extra for NFC services or technology. And he said there is too much fragmentation in the NFC standards, services and handset certification requirements.
“Use of NFC services is very low,” said Yoon. “One example, in Korea, as you know, we started launching NFC services on Galaxy S II, Galaxy Note and Galaxy S III, so in Korea I think there are tens of millions of NFC devices already in the market. (But) consumers, they don’t know how to use it. They don’t even know they have something called NFC that they can use for transportation and mobile payment.”
