Junko Yoshia reports from the Cartes 2002 show in Paris.
Hampered by the market saturation of prepaid telephone cards and by serious delays in Europe’s third-generation mobile-phone rollout, smart cards are fast losing their 1990s glow of consistent double-digit annual growth, according to attendees at the Cartes 2002 smart-card conference here this week.
Even sales for so-called multiapplication smart cards, supposedly a key driver for advanced cards with bigger memories and more processing power, have been disappointing, said Jorgen Rasmussen, president of cards at SchlumbergerSema, a business unit of Schlumberger Ltd. “There was a lot of hype in multiapplication cards,” he said, acknowledging that making a business case for them has been hard.
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