China’s NFC market continues to gather steam, with No. 3 telco, China Telecom, announcing a nationwide launch Thursday and one of China’s largest commercial financial institutions, China Merchants Bank, introducing mobile payment on embedded chips in three Samsung NFC devices.
China Telecom has set ambitious goals for its project, including rolling out 30 million NFC SIMs and 40 NFC phone models by next year, with more than a dozen banks saying they will make their payment applications available for the service.
The launch, expected to start in earnest next month, follows a launch last June of NFC by China’s largest telco, China Mobile, which had set only somewhat less ambitious goals for SIMs and handsets, which it failed to meet. China’s No. 2 operator, China Unicom, which launched a small NFC project for bragging rights in December of 2012, is expected to follow soon with an announcement of a national rollout.
China Merchants Bank has made its payment application available with all three telcos, including China Telecom, and also launched a payments service last year on embedded chips in two Android NFC phones from HTC.
It’s latest launch, announced last week, will use embedded chips in the Samsung Galaxy S4, Galaxy Note 2 and Galaxy 3 III. This would make it the first bank to launch under Samsung’s embedded chip strategy.
That would put it ahead of a planned launch by Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which last month was the first bank to disclose plans to use the new Samsung embedded chips. The bank will launch with a MasterCard PayPass application.
Visa, which announced a deal last February to enable its payWave application on Samsung’s embedded chips, has yet to launch a project, though one or more banks in Hong Kong and Australia are said to be furthest along.
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Among Topics Covered:
•Nationwide SIM-based NFC launch planned by China Telecom
•Mobile-payments project by China Merchants bank using embedded chips in three Samsung NFC phones
•China UnionPay’s Embedded Chip Push
•Open approach to mobile wallets
•Chinese SIM vendors providing NFC UIMs to China Telecom
Among companies and organizations mentioned:
China Telecom
China Merchants Bank
China UnionPay
China Mobile
China Unicom
Samsung Electronics
Oberthur Technologies
MediaTek
Beijing Huahong
Hengbao
Eastcompeace
Watchdata
Wuhan Tianyu
NXP Semiconductors
Infineon Technologies
STMicroelectronics
Samsung SDS
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