Just under 3 months ago we reported, with great enthusiasm, that the CEO of NXP Semiconductors, Rick Clemmer (pictured above), predicted that by the end of this year over 100 million mobile phones with near field communication (NFC) support would ship. Today we’re sad to say that the company has revised their estimate, and that they’ll be happy if 40 million such devices hit the market. Now who exactly is NXP? The company is the result of a sale done in 2006 of a division inside Philips that was founded over 50 years ago to a group of private equity investors. Along with Sony, NXP was a co-inventor of NFC. The first smartphone to ship with NFC support in America, the Samsung Nexus S for Sprint, features hardware from NXP. It’s safe to say that they’re a large player in the near field space. So what’s the cause of this drastic change to their forecast? Clemmer told Near Field Communications World that:
“We believe the shortfall is due to a combination of formulation and agreement on the specific business models to support the ecosystem as well as business challenges some handset OEMs are experiencing in the marketplace.”
In other words, there’s too much bickering between companies who are fighting to own the relationship between you and your hard earned money. Your operator wants to become your trusted provider of financial services, possibly even selling the data trail you leave to advertising firms. Visa and MasterCard don’t want to lose their dominance, so they’re trying to convince people that just because they’ve had such great success in the market with their plastic rectangles featuring magnetic stripes, they’re in the best position to bring you the latest technology has to offer. And then there’s the new kids on the block, Google and Apple, who already disrupted the mobile industry, so they’re cocky enough to think they can do the same to the mobile payments field.
Grow up already, and ship this stuff!