The Chinese NFC market is gearing up for rollouts in 2013, with No. 2 telco Unicom preparing to launch in December 2012 and its larger rival, China Mobile, readying a huge trial scheduled to start in February, followed by a commercial launch later next year. Both telcos plan to put payment and other secure applications onto SIM cards supporting the single-wire protocol. But that is not the only secure element being promoted in China. In fact, China Merchants Bank, Unicom’s launch partner, has already announced an NFC payments service that loads its application onto embedded chips in HTC phones. And UnionPay is also promoting microSD cards for use in NFC phones.