According to a new research report issued by research firm Berg Insight, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48.2 percent, annual shipments are forecasted to reach 1 billion units by 2017. Wider adoption of NFC in mobile phones began in 2011 and accelerated in 2012 when the top-ten handset vendors released nearly 100 NFC-enabled models. NFC technology enables numerous applications such as information exchange, device pairing for establishing Bluetooth or WLAN connections, access control, electronic ticketing and secure contactless payments. However, it will take some time before the stakeholders agree on business models for payment networks and access to secure elements that store the sensitive user information in NFC-enabled handsets. Moreover, the report has explained that connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth, WLAN and GPS are already standard features in most smartphones. Shipments of WLAN-enabled handsets increased to 700 million units in 2012 and the attach rate reached 44 percent. Several new WLAN standards and certification programmes are now being adopted to enable new use cases and improve the user experience when using WLAN in handsets.
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