Smart card vendor association Eurosmart today confirmed its earlier projection that industry suppliers would ship at least 250 million secure elements for NFC devices in 2013, and predicted shipments would grow by 64% next year to 435 million units.

The projected growth for 2014 shows the vendor group believes demand for secure elements will slow only slightly from the previous year. Eurosmart's forecast of 265 million secure element shipments by the end of 2013 would represent growth of 76.7% from 2012. That year, vendors shipped about 150 million secure elements, Eurosmart earlier estimated. 

The vendor group, as before, did not offer a breakdown for the types of secure elements vendors have been shipping in 2013. But as in 2012, the shipments are expected to be heavily weighted toward embedded chips, thanks to Samsung Electronics putting the chips in most of its NFC smartphones. 

As NFC Times reported last month, the GSMA mobile operator trade group forecasts that about 80 million NFC SIM cards will be shipped this year. Gemalto, the largest supplier of NFC SIMs, also mentioned an 80 million projection for NFC SIMs this year. If both the NFC SIM and overall secure element shipment projections come to pass, it would mean that NFC SIMs will amount to about 30% of total secure element shipments this year. Virtually all the rest, or 70%, would be embedded chips. 

Eurosmart chairman Oyvind Rastad, a director of corporate strategy for Gemalto, told NFC Times today that the vendor group did not expect to see any significant slowdown of secure element shipments next year. 

He presented the vendor group’s semi-annual shipment figures and forecast today at the Cartes 2013 show in Paris. The association includes such major smart card vendors as Gemalto, Oberthur Technologies, Giesecke & Devrient and Safran Morpho; and such major NFC secure element producers as NXP Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics and Infineon Technologies. 

Eurosmart also forecast that contactless banking cards and other contactless card shipments would grow substantially this year. Dual-interface banking cards would hit the 500 million mark, up by 30% from 2012 and representing a little more than one-third of all chip-based bank cards expected to be shipped for the year, Eurosmart said. 

Contactless cards in other market segments, such as government ID and transit, would also increase. All told, contactless cards and e-documents, including banking cards, electronic driving licenses, e-passports and secure transit cards, would increase by 23% this year to a total of 930 million units, said the vendor group. 

Shipments of contactless cards encourage rollouts of NFC phones and services since both contactless cards and NFC phones are based on the same underlying technology and generally can be used on the same terminals. 

In 2012, embedded chips representated an even higher percentage total secure element shipments–about 80%, with NFC SIMs making up the rest. Vendors shipped an estimated 30 million NFC SIMs that year, according to the SIMalliance supplier group. 

The SIM shipment figures are growing substantially this year thanks in large part to orders from Verizon Wireless and AT&T, which have been gearing up for their Isis national launch. In addition, shipments remain strong to Japan and South Korea. Western European operators are also beginning to take delivery of more of the cards. 

But the projected 80 million NFC SIMs for this year still will represent a small percentage of the 5 billion SIM cards Eurosmart forecasts the industry will have shipped by the end of this year. 

A low percentage of all secure elements–either SIMs or embedded chips–are actually used for services by phone users and most are intended to seed the market. 

Samsung is not the only manufacturer shipping NFC devices packing embedded chips. Among others are BlackBerry and HTC. 

Very few have been used to date, however. Samsung’s partnership with payment schemes Visa and MasterCard Worldwide could yield at least one or two commercial launches before the end of the year, probably in Australia. 

Google tapped embedded chips for its Google Wallet, launched in 2011, but the wallet has not been used much. And No. 3 U.S. telco Sprint is using the embedded chips for its Pinsight Touch platform, launched last month. 

In addition, HTC has been involved in small launches of payment applets stored on embedded chips, in China and, more recently, Russia.