The number of smart cards that will ship into the government and healthcare citizen ID market in 2013 will decline by 6 million to 435 million.
ABI Research said the smart cards market continues to suffer from the on-going effect of project delays. Projects in the pipeline which were scheduled for 2013 deployments look certain to be pushed back to 2014, before significant volumes are realized. Delayed/slow to progress projects include the planned smart national ID card deployments in Russia, Brazil, Poland, and France.
Large scale projects such as the national ID card in Indonesia and Germany’s smart healthcare card will reach completion this year. The lion’s share of deployments in these two projects was completed in 2012 with significantly less business forecast for 2013. As a result YoY forecasts for worldwide healthcare and national ID cards are down by 5 million and 24 million respectively when compared to 2012 results.
The market’s susceptibility to project delays was demonstrated in 2013. It is no coincidence that the majority of delayed projects have been in the deployment of ambitious multi-application national ID cards. The complexity of multi-application cannot be underestimated and a factor for consideration when anticipating a projects time to market.
ABI Research says the market shows positive signs in terms of the project/business pipeline, specifically within the deployment of healthcare, national ID and driver’s license cards with strong growth expected to reignite the market. Additionally, new and next generation card adoption is supporting higher-end interfaces, presenting a higher value proposition.
France, Brazil, Russia, and Poland all have dual interface national ID card deployments in the pipeline. Europe is beginning to move to a standardized driver’s license with optional secure IC integration; an option France has already committed to and rumours that the Medicare program in the U.S. will adopt smart technology remain.
ABI Research says that the latter could have a significant domino effect on smart card adoption. Private healthcare providers in the U.S. could follow Medicare’s example and the option of smart card integration into European driver’s licenses provides additional significant future opportunities.
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