Smart Cards (Global Market)

According to the forecast of ABI Research, the market volume of various types of smart cards, biometric information carriers and electronic identity cards will grow by 2016 to reach $72 billion. It is assumed that the lion's part of the funds will come from state budgets as part of the implementation of national programs for the transition to electronic passports. The latter circumstance fully explains the astronomical financial indicators of the forecast, because the wave of informatization will theoretically cover the entire population of individual countries, and then the quantitative indicators will be no less impressive.

The turning point for the introduction of new technologies should be 2014. First of all, thanks to government programs in Brazil, China, Poland and France, the number of electronic identity identification tools in the world will exceed the number of familiar paper documents. The market volume will come close to the mark of $15 billion.

The analyst Phil Sealy is sure that behind technologies of contactless identification the big future. They have already established themselves from the best side in many national projects in Germany, Egypt and especially large-scale ones in China. John Devlin, director of the ABI Research team, also has high hopes for the next phase of the Aadhaar project in India. It is so large that it is able to influence the alignment of forces in the global market and, most importantly, lay the fundamental foundations for the deployment of a number of online and offline services for government agencies and commercial organizations.

The Smart Cards in Government and Healthcare Citizen ID report containing the above information is part of the more extensive ABI Research document - Smart Cards & Embedded Security and Smart Cities Research Services. Both discuss in detail possible barriers and drivers to the mass distribution of smart cards.