Eurosmart: 10 billion secure elements

The history repeats itself and habits are well established: Trustech, the main event for digital trust technologies, is the place where Eurosmart announces its results and forecasts, providing all of us with its global vision of the industry.

This year, Stefane Mouille, President of Eurosmart, insisted on the fact the secure transactions industry has been experiencing a steady growth for several decades now. Since 2014, Eurosmart has added an oem segment, called “device manufacturers” to its traditional ones: telecom, financial services, government and healthcare and others.

Globally, Eurosmart counts shipments of secure elements, and says that 10.2 billion units were shipped in 2018, and anticipates a 1.9% growth for 2019 with 10.3 billion secure elements.

SIM cards keep on making the largest volumes in the industry, with an overall stable market, of 5.6 billion SIM cards in 2019. Eurosmart adds that the M2M subsegment represents a growing share of this total.

The second segment in terms of volume is financial services, with a 3.2% growth between 2018 and 2019, leading to 3.2 billion units forecasted for 2019.

The oem segment, that accounts for mobile phones, tablets, navigation devices and other connected devices that include an embedded secure element without SIM application, is the only one with a double-digit growth at 10.2% leading to 485 million units to be shipped in 2019.

In the government and healthcare segment, contactless interface keeps on being the dominant choice for smart government eIDs, essentially ePassports. The segment is reported to reach 530 million secure elements in 2019, a 6% growth vs. 2018.

Eurosmart also tackles the IoT market and attempts to publish reliable market figures about it. However, the industry association, so far, declines to itemize IoT with secure element shipment figures. For the time being, and according to GSMA, the IoT market is estimated to pass the 10 billion units mark in 2019 and to reach 25 billion units by 2025. Out of these, GSMA estimates there will be 10 billion consumer IoT connections and 14 billion industrial IoT connections. Eurosmart is also getting involved in the set-up of a future certification scheme for IoT security in Europe by participating in several certification organizations.

While Eurosmart in counting secure elements and a part of Trustech is still dedicated to module packaging and embedding machines, the rest of the show focuses on applications, software, digital ID, security services, etc. When will our industry association acknowledge these activities and how will they report them?