Smart card market cools down, but only a touch

No big surprises here: according to vendor trade group Eurosmart, global smart card shipments in 2007 are expected to continue to grow, if at a slightly slower pace than last year, with 20 percent growth on 3.1 billion units. 2006 saw 40 percent growth, and the decrease is said to be the result of a 2006 boom in SIM cards that has since levelled off. “Growth of volume is coming from Asia and Latin America,” said Eurosmart chairman Jacques Seneca. “India is growing strongly, and China is growing again.” Most importantly of all, “the smallest, yet fastest, growing segment of the smart card industry will again be government ID cards and documents,” reports Card Technology, noting that unit shipments in the sector are expected to expand this year by 56 percent to 140 million units. “Chips and other components for ePassports will increase only modestly to about 30 million units this year, up from about 20 million in 2006.”

These trends, Eurosmart explains, are driven by blossoming national ID card projects in such places as Portugal, Qatar, Oman, Belgium, and many others, as well as health card projects in France and Germany. (China, it should be pointed out, will soon roll-out its own national ID program, but that initiative does not use true smart cards.) In addition, “ePassport shipments are projected to as much as triple in a few years,” with forty countries participating now and a projected seventy expected to do so in the future.