Consumer Electronics and Payment Cards to Drive $5.8 Billion Fingerprint Sensor Market: Report

MarketsandMarkets is anticipating modest growth in the fingerprint sensor market in the next few years. The firm expects to see a CAGR of 10.9 percent as the market climbs from $3.5 billion in 2021 to $5.8 billion in 2026.

That remains true despite the impact of COVID-19, which has disrupted supply chains and pushed people toward more sanitary contactless solutions. In that regard, MarketsandMarkets noted that fingerprint sensors are now competing with facial recognition cameras in industries like payments and security.

However, the demand for fingerprint sensors will still be high in consumer IoT devices like smartphones and tablets, and in the next generation of smart payment cards. The expansion of the IoT will ultimately create new opportunities for sensor manufacturers, as more equipment developers move to integrate biometric technologies into their product lines.

Fingerprints sensors will also be popular in the government sector, and in biometric time and attendance tracking systems. Unfortunately, there are some concerns about the integrity of fingerprint databases, which could slow the rollout of some fingerprint systems.

Capacitive sensors will be the most common kind of sensor, though the demand for ultrasonic sensors will grow at a faster rate, the report predicts. The capacitive sensors will be more popular because they are both cheap and compact, which makes it easier to deploy them in a portable device with a small form factor. Those sensors are expected to turn up in biometric payment cards, while in-display optical fingerprint sensors will become the go-to option in most smartphones. That use case will make optical sensors the second most popular kind of sensor.

By the same token, the consumer electronics market will push the demand for area and touch sensors beyond the demand for swipe sensors, largely because touch sensors are able to deliver a high level of accuracy in a smaller and less expensive package. Many of those consumer devices will be sold in the Asia Pacific region, which will make up the biggest segment of the overall fingerprint sensor market. Finally, the 2D sensor market will be bigger than the 3D sensor market, though the latter will display a higher CAGR.

MarketsandMarkets listed Goodix, FPC, Apple, Synaptics, and Egis as some of the biggest players in the fingerprint sensor space, though companies like IDEX and Suprema received a mention in certain sectors. The 2021 forecast is down slightly from MarketsandMarkets’ 2020 report, which suggested that the fingerprint sensor market would hit $6 billion in 2025.

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October 8, 2021 – by Eric Weiss