Re: Smart Cards & SIM things.
<< I remember chatting with you about a pure play in smart cards, but the discussion basically boiled down to giants like Schlumberger and Gemplus. There didn't seem to be a play there at all >>
That may change.
I'm not quite up to date on the subject but it looks like Gemplus will IPO on the Paris & NASDAQ exchanges this year. Oberthur has recently, or will shortly, IPO'ed on the Paris exchange.
Both Gemplus & Oberthur are "pure" smart card plays although I think Oberthur still does currency engraving things. Gemplus is number one in smart cards. Oberthur is number 3 due to a recent acquisition of De La Rue's smart card enterprise. Both are headquartered in France with a large US presence. Gemplus will exceed $1 Billion in annual sales this year.
A question in my mind are whether these guys are potentially primates or royalty. The answer might have been different a few years ago, but there is a strong tendency towards open standards in their industry, even though their is strong IP held by individual vendors (most notably Bull and Gemplus). A problem in the industry was that card manufacturers tended to keep things (particularly operating systems) to proprietary.
<< When my father-in-law upgraded his handset last Summer the dealer in Sweden basically said the old handset was worthless (could be sold as a paperweight in a pinch). He did remove a small, cardboard-like chip from behind the battery which apparently had either his subscriber ID information or a couple KB of memory used for storing numbers and names. The dealer pulled it out and installed it in the new handset so he didn't have to reprogram it. My father-in-law was happy he didn't have to chicken peck in all of his data again >>
You have described the basic functionality of the SIM very well in the clip above, and the expanded explanation in the post.
Smart Cards are in a period of hypergrowth worldwide, but US remains an exception. The emerging "killer" application is associated with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), portable credentials (like a portable SIM subscription) that can be used to access the Internet or a Corporate Intranet or Extranet, from your mobile phone, a desktop, laptop, or PDA.
Flash is not yet widely used in smart cards, or in the smart card form factor. Atmel as I noted is an exception. Seems to me Infineon (Siemens spinoff) has a relationship with SanDisk. Infineon is the largest manufacturer of microprocessor smart card chips for "IC Cards", but these chips are only about 10% of their semiconductor production. Smart card chips are "on allocation" and their is a significant shortage of them, which is an industry problem.
- Eric - |
