Nachfrageboom bei Smart Cards

The value chain for smart cards is changing from the traditional horizontal line of semiconductor vendors-smart card manufacturers-card issuers to a mesh of vendors. The growing demand for open platforms and the need for interoperability has led to the arrival of independent Java OS companies such as IBMIBM and Aspects Software that have an impact on the smart card value chain. The arrival of these companies with interoperable operating systems has made it possible for silicon vendors to push themselves up the value chain into the smart card manufacturer territory leading to possible competition with their own clients. This has already been witnessed in the industry with ST Microelectronics having a licensing agreement with Aspects Software, and having acquired Proton World and Incard. The trend in the government ID market toward electronic passports has brought in new participants that have traditionally provided passport covers and pages to governments. Most of these suppliers are regional in nature. As a result, a new set of partnerships and alliances are likely to be required to target these markets full-scale. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

In 2003, 2,473.2 million smart card ICs were shipped generating revenues of $1,404.4 million. In 2007, Frost & Sullivan expects to see the total number of ICs shipped to rise to 4,184.1 million generating revenues of $2,384.1 million, recording a CAGR of 14.0 percent and 14.1 percent for unit shipments and revenues, respectively. It comes as no surprise that the EMEA region is the largest and accounts for the majority of the market both in terms of revenues and units. The Asia Pacific region was the second largest in 2003.

North America is experiencing a tremendous amount of momentum in government and ID applications after the events of September 11, 2001 in the form of several government-sponsored smart card programs. Latin America's use of smart cards is predominantly for GSM and banking applications. These application segments are the largest within this region. The memory card market is primarily composed of phone card applications. Mexico is the largest country in the phone card business. A much smaller percentage of memory cards in the region comes from transit and loyalty cards. Brazil leads the transit application in the region with projects in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

The European market gained momentum especially in the SIM card area. Many operators resumed investments in the latter part of the year to improve their cost of operations through improved SIM renewal process. This, in turn, led to a higher demand for high-end cards (64 k and 128 k cards) -- some of these were 3G. The potential of national ID and private government projects is mammoth and expectation is high, even on a global level. Passport projects are also expected to inject some steady growth into the market in the next 4 years. In Asia Pacific, the smart card IC market is particularly driven by successful and emerging applications. There are a variety of applications and each are at different stages of development. The memory and microcontroler markets in APAC are expected to grow at 0.9 percent and 18.0 percent respectively.

The stronghold of the top six smart card IC participants remains though there have been market ranking shifts within these six participants. Infineon continues to dominate the market share and has distanced itself further from the number two-market player. Renesas Technologies has gained the second spot in the microcontrollers market, overtaking STMicroelectronics in the process. Philips has the third spot in total smart card IC unit shipments. Atmel Corporation and SAMSUNG continue to strengthen themselves, recording massive growth rates. Local Asian participants especially in China have also created further competition. STMicroelectronics and Atmel were the successful companies in terms of gaining market shares for revenues. ST made inroads through the sale of micro-modules and Atmel with its Flash memory products kept a very healthy ASP.

Anoop Ubhey ist Senior Smart Card Industry Analyst bei Frost & Sullivan.

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