Berg Insight is out with a new report, looking at the shipments of NFC-enabled devices. According to the research company, global sales of such products increased ten-fold in 2011 to 30 million units and are set to reach 700 million units in 2016, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 87.8%.
At the moment, major industry players are competing with each other to use the technology for enabling mobile payments, but it [technology] also has other use cases like reading tags and easy pairing of devices.
Berg reminded us NFC is just one piece of the puzzle, with growing smartphone adoption also driving higher attach rates for other technologies in handsets including GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN — all of which “come as standard” on high-end devices as well as most medium- and low-end models.
For instance, the attach rate for GPS among GSM/WCDMA/LTE handsets reached 31% in 2011 and grew to 38% for all air interface (CDMA included) standards. Shipments of WLAN-enabled handsets have more or less doubled annually in the past four years with the attach rate increasing to 33% in 2011…
As usual, more information is available from Berg’s full report titled “Handset Connectivity Technologies.”