In-Display Fingerprint Sensors Will Become ‘Largest Portion’ of Mobile Market This Year: FPC CEO

Fingerprint Cards has issued its results for the first quarter of this year, showing a considerable improvement in a challenging market.

The fingerprint sensor specialist’s sales were up 18 percent year-over-year, with revenues coming in at SEK 342.9 million, compared to SEK 289.7 million in Q1 of 2018. Its net results was also dramatically improved, with Fingerprints reporting a loss of SEK 3.5 million, compared to a loss of SEK 148.2 million a year ago. That’s a 98 percent improvement.

FPC’s Low-Cost Challenger

Commenting on the results, Fingerprints CEO Christian Fredrikson highlighted his clients’ ongoing shift to FPC1511, a particularly low-cost sensor aimed at helping Fingerprint Cards to compete in a saturated mobile biometrics market that has seen plummeting ASPs over the past year or two.

“Fingerprints should be able to achieve a higher level of profitability and my assessment is that the positive effect on profitability of the generational change to FPC1511 will continue during the second quarter of 2019,” Fredrikson said, adding that the sensor model has been “very well received” by OEM customers and that Fingerprint Cards is planning to launch a new generation of sensors based on FPC1511 “later this year.”

The Next Big Wave in Mobile Biometrics

Fredrikson also noted the mobile industry’s trend toward in-display fingerprint sensors, which “will probably overtake the capacitive sensor already this year as the largest portion of the market for fingerprint sensors for smartphones in terms of value.” Fingerprints has launched another sensor model, FPC1610, in a bid to capture that market segment, and so far it has seen a positive response in tests with OEMs.

Fingerprint Cards’ expansion into other areas beyond the mobile sector, especially biometric payment cards, did not go without mention, with Fredrikson asserting that “Fingerprints is very well positioned to capture a significant share of this emerging market.” But the key efforts appear to be in mobile biometrics, the market area in which Fingerprints has held a salient leading position for several years now.

–

May 15, 2019 – by Alex Perala