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SIM manufacturers shipped 30 million NFC SIM cards in 2012, 70% of them to mobile operators in South Korea and Japan, with Europe beginning to ramp up, the SIMalliance trade association said today in announcing its global SIM shipment figures for the year.

The 10-year anniversary of the official birth of NFC came and went quietly on Sept. 5, 2012.

Japan’s largest telco, NTT DoCoMo, has begun to make a key piece of its strategy for NFC known, announcing deals with MasterCard Worldwide and South Korea’s KT Corp. to enable subscribers to make payments when they roam in other countries.

While he announced that U.S. mobile operator Sprint will introduce more than 10 additional NFC phones supporting the Google Wallet this year, Osama Bedier, who heads the wallet program at Google, revealed few other details about how the Web giant plans to boost the wallet’s market presence.

Samsung Electronics has confirmed it has an NFC version of its Galaxy Note, though that comes as no surprise to operators in South Korea, which have been selling the tablet-smartphone hybrid with NFC inside for about two months.

While mobile operators in most other countries are still struggling to roll out even scant volumes of NFC phones that can do payment, ticketing and other applications, South Korea’s telcos have already crossed the 5 million-phone mark–including NFC versions of such high-profile devices as the Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note.

2012 was going to be the year that the new era of NFC-based mobile commerce had finally arrived–with Google Wallet rolling out widely, mobile operators in the U.S. and Europe making significant inroads with their own mobile wallets and big Asian m-commerce players generally commercializing NFC, as well.

KT, South Korea’s second largest mobile operator, is distributing NFC-enabled iPhone attachments nationwide, p

South Korean mobile operator KT Corp. is launching a small rollout of NFC services on Apple’s iPhone 4, using an attachment called iCarte that contains a full NFC chip.

The major Japanese and South Korean mobile operators in separate announcements today revealed details for planned cross-border NFC services­–signaling the move by the telcos away from domestic contactless-mobile technology to standard NFC.