Frost & Sullivan Report Names Siemens Leader in Worldwide Smart Card IC Sales
MUNICH, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 10, 1998--Frost & Sullivan has named Siemens the leader in smart card IC sales worldwide in 1997.
The high-tech market research firm's ''Worldwide Smart Card ICs Market'' report states that Siemens accounted for some 43 percent of smart card IC market last year.
Ulrich Hamann, president of the Security and Chip Card IC division at Siemens Semiconductors, Munich, Germany, said that he agreed with the Frost & Sullivan report that the market has slowed to a virtual crawl over the past year. ''But the turnaround may come sooner than we had expected,'' he noted. Siemens expects that the smart card IC sales will begin to accelerate before the end of 1998 and that overall market growth could return to the 20 to 25 percent range in 1999. ''We are already witnessing an overall increase in demand in the market due to new projects on the horizon. We predict strong growth worldwide in demand in SIM cards for GSM phones, in banking and electronic commerce, in electronic signature and in government identification cards.''
Siemens also expects to see a quick transition to high-end microcontroller cards, including 16- and even 32-Kbyte cards. ''The new controllers will allow card suppliers to provide multi-functional cards, such as combination purse, debit/credit and transit,'' Hamann said. ''But the real value of these high-end chips lies in their ability to provide sophisticated security features that can be written in popular, open software platforms.'' |
