Report: 30 million NFC phones shipped in 2011
28 March, 2012
category: NFC
Global sales of NFC-enabled handsets increased ten-fold in 2011 to 30 million units, according to a new research report by Berg Insight.
Berg’s report predicts that the NFC handset market will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 87.8%, boosting annual shipments to 700 million units in 2016.
According to senior analyst André Malm, NFC technology reached a breakthrough in 2011 when several leading handset vendors released more than 40 NFC-enabled handsets.
“Even though it will take some time before the stakeholders agree on business models for 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 already today,” explained Malm.
According to the report, other connectivity technologies such as GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN are on the rise as well, and will soon be standard in most mid to low end smart phones and in a growing number of feature phones.