NFC TimesThe premier source for news, analysis and commentary on
Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

MELBOURNE, SYDNEY, Australia – NFC Times Exclusive: On the face of it, Australia would seem like an ideal market for Apple to expand its Apple Pay service outside of the U.S. After all, iPhone market share here now hovers around 40%, usage rates of contactless payment at retail are the highest in the world and major banks are eager to roll out mobile payment.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Google announced its much-anticipated response to Apple Pay, with an updated host-card-emulation-based payments platform, Android Pay, that will incorporate tokenization,  fingerprint biometrics and in-app payments, in addition to in-store tapping to pay. 

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Samsung is hiring established TSM vendors to assist with the provisioning and secure element management for its forthcoming Samsung Pay service, at least in some markets, sources told NFC Times.

NFC Times Exclusive – Oberthur Technologies, the No. 2 smart card vendor globally and a major bank card and SIM supplier, had flat sales in 2014, blamed mainly on lower revenue in its telecom business unit from falling prices for lower-end SIM cards, slow sales of NFC SIMs and a hiatus in its contract to supply embedded chips to Samsung.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Orange in Spain is the latest telco to announce the launch of a co-branded mobile-payments service using SIM cards and NFC phones, one of about 15 or so operators to launch globally so far. But it remains to be seen how many more will follow suit.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Smart card vendor association Eurosmart has confirmed its estimate that vendors shipped 350 million NFC secure elements last year, up 30% from the year before, fueled by embedded chips in Apple’s iPhones and what is probably the last significant growth spurt in NFC SIM card shipments. It predicts shipments of 550 million secure elements in 2015, up 57% from 2014, though revised downward from an earlier projection.

NFC Times Exclusive –  Besides payments, Samsung is targeting nonpayment applications, and is seeing “growing interest” in its embedded chips, Samsung Pay director Victor Kim told NFC Times.

NFC Times Exclusive – Falling SIM card prices among other challenges have forced such major smart card and NFC vendors as Giesecke & Devrient and Oberthur Technologies to restructure, though strong growth in shipments of EMV cards to Asia and the United States helped them record growth in overall revenue in 2014.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Payment network Discover Financial Services announced its support for Apple Pay on Monday, becoming the fourth major payment networks in the U.S. to join Apple Pay.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – With the first Apple Watch units set to be delivered this week, NFC payments for wearable devices becomes a budding market, though it remains to be seen whether consumers want to tap their watches or wristbands to pay.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – The SIMalliance vendor group is playing up what it calls soaring growth in NFC SIM shipments in 2014, despite troubling signs for the future of SIM-based NFC, such as Apple Pay and similar initiatives by other OEMs, as well as growing interest in host-card emulation and the failure of SIM-based NFC services to take off.