China’s No. 3 mobile operator, China Telecom, has selected a list of six SIM vendors for its large planned rollout of NFC services.

The orders overall could be large, with China Telecom’s tender document released in December calling for 50 million SWP-SIM cards, or NFC SIMs. It remains to be seen how quickly the telco rolls out NFC and how many SIMs it actually orders. 

Five of the six suppliers are Chinese-based vendors, with the one exception, France-based Gemalto, which was mentioned last on the procurement list, indicating it is expected to get smaller orders than the others.