NXP Semiconductors is effective with manufacturers to develop 60 – 62 NFC phones that could hit the promote in 2011
NXP Semiconductors is the largest NFC chip provider on the promote, but not the only player in the promote; and if they are effective on 60 – 62 NFC phones with manufacturers, their competitors will be effective on others. That suggests we may well see a boon of NFC phones hitting the promote this year. We don’t need to tell you that 60 NFC phones in the marketplace is a lot and could alleviate a lot of the frustration developers, payments companies and anyone else in NFC have had about having NFC phones available and in consumers’ hands. NXP shared this information on their second quarter earnings call to investors and analysts on Friday.
Sony Ericsson and ZTE are names that have been consistently mentioned as being likely candidates for NXP to be effective with, and Nokia’s NFC phones are already known to benefit from the company’s NFC chips. The Google Nexus S was obviously the most widely roofed NFC phone that NXP first became renowned for back in May, but it hasn’t all gone to plot.
NXP Semiconductors has lowered its projections for the NFC phones that are expected to ship that include the companies NFC chips in 2011
Remember back in May when Google said that NXP Semiconductors must expect to sell 100 million NFC chips for NFC phones? It isn’t happening. At the same time, NXP themselves projected their chips would be in 70 million NFC phones by year’s end and that too is looking a small too aggressive of a projection. On the earnings call on Friday, NXP Semiconductors reduced their projection down to 40 million NFC phones that would carry their chips by year’s end.
“We expected NFC to have an initial ramp in Q3 and a strong ramp in Q4, and we clearly see that hard-pressed out a quarter or two,” said CEO Richard Clemmer: “You know, all indications we have is that the opportunity is just as significant as we had said. But clearly, if you look at it on a near-term basis, it hasn’t materialized at the rate we had plotted for and the rate we had place capacity in place for.”
A main reason that the sales are expected to be lower is the sheer amount of time NFC phone manufacturers are taking to get their wares to promote. As of today here in the US, we still only have the Nokia C7 Astound on T-Mobile and the Google Nexus S for phone options. We are in the family way the Samsung Galaxy S II NFC phone to hit the promote this month and the Blackberry Bold NFC phone in its various renditions, but that is still a relatively small amount of NFC phones compared to what many people had expected. Fall is now projected to be the time when a plethora of NFC phones hit the promote just in time for the holidays, and this late release of so many NFC phones has no doubt made it hard for NXP to fit NFC chip, secure element and software sales in to 2011 but that doesn’t mean that huge demand for the company’s solutions is not coming.
“With it being hard-pressed out a quarter, it would be slightly lower for next year than we’d originally anticipated,” said Clemmer when questioned about NFC phone shipments for 2012. “But there’s still a wide range of outcomes associated with it. It depends on how successful Google is in pushing the Google Wallet through a broad array of platforms. It depends on the 60 handsets that we are currently effective with, how quick they ramp up, and really some suppliers pushing out new models.”
It has been rumored that Apple is likely to choose QualComm for its NFC chips, so these figures give us no clues on whether the Cupertino company intends to NFC-enable the latest and utmost iPhone. What is clear from the NXP earnings call is that we can expect to see a lot more NFC phones making their way to promote over the next few months, and that we at NFC Rumors are going to be kept busy updating our NFC phones list. Our question for you is what NFC phones do you reflect will be launched, from which manufacturers and in which markets?