NFC tag supplier Identive announced it has received orders for 4 million NFC tags to support a retail project in France and a payment and banking project in Africa.

Three million NFC Forum Type 2 tags will go for use for a mobile-retail application in France, about which Identive declines to release details. Identive said 800,000 of those tags will ship later in this quarter, with no indication of when the other tags will ship.

One million of Identive’s “Tag on Metal” stickers will go to the payment and banking rollout in Africa; all of these tags will ship during this quarter.

U.S.- and Germany-based Identive also announced that an unnamed mobile network operator is deploying a mobile marketing campaign using the company’s Tagtrail campaign management platform; the company has not specified the number of tags involved in that deployment.

Tagtrail, launched in late November 2012, was involved in demonstrations at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. NFC-enabled campaigns for AT&T, Cisco, Ericsson, Qualcomm, Samsung and Vodafone at Mobile World Congress 2013’s Connected City exhibit received around 1,100 taps during the four-day event. During a conference call in March 2013, Identive CEO Ayman S. Ashour said, "Before the end of Q1, we expect Tagtrail to be on direct-to-consumer trials with large telcos in multiple major countries on a national basis." It's not clear whether these have launched.

In March 2013, Identive reported that during the fourth quarter of 2012, it shipped 15 million NFC tags and received orders for 8 million more for “machine-to-machine” applications, to be shipped during the first quarter of 2013 as follow-ons to orders from the fourth quarter of 2012. Machine-to-machine applications could include tags in toy figurines that players place on NFC readers built into platforms to enter characters in the game.

The final quarter of 2012 brought the company’s first quarterly profit since at least 2008 with revenue of $26.6 million and a net quarterly income of $177,000, which included a $1.4 million income tax benefit for impairment charges earlier in the year. The company, which restructured last year, does not break out NFC revenue in its financial statements.