Taiwanese mobile operators have sold a combined 4.2 million NFC-enabled phones and hope to launch their joint TSM platform by the end of the year.

But there are still few NFC SIMs in circulation in Taiwan and hitting the year-end launch objective for the TSM will be difficult, sources told NFC Times.

Taiwan, where a strong smartphone ownership rate and contactless-acceptance infrastructure bode well for eventual rollouts of NFC payments, seems likely to experience fragmentation. That’s the case even though there is not one but two joint ventures that are building centralized TSM hubs or aggregation services.