Fingerprint Cards Regains Sales Growth in Q3 Update

Fingerprint Cards (or “Fingerprints”) has issued its interim report for the first three quarters of the year, highlighting sequential growth amid continuing difficulties in the highly saturated mobile fingerprint sensor market.

For the January – September period, Fingerprints’ revenues came in at SEK 1,110.8 M, a drop of 53 percent compared to the same period last year. For the third quarter in particular, Fingerprints saw SEK 431.2 million in revenues, a 49 percent drop year-over-year.

As for its net result, the company has seen a loss of SEK 613.2 million for the first three quarters of this year, a 548 percent drop compared to 2017. But things were looking up in the third quarter, with Fingerprints reporting a profit of SEK 2.9 million – still a 94 percent drop year-over-year, but certainly indicative of an improvement with respect to the larger trend.

Commenting on the results in a statement, Fingerprints CEO Christian Fredrikson suggested that the company’s cost reduction efforts have helped it to regain positive sales growth, and noted that Fingerprints’ forthcoming low-cost fingerprint sensor announced earlier this year “has now undergone all tests with highly favorable results and it has been well received by several major OEM customers,” adding that this FPC1511 sensor should arrive in commercial phones launching at the end of this year or in early 2019.

Fredrikson also gestured to emerging opportunities beyond the mobile market that has been Fingerprints’ mainstay, including potential automotive applications of its fingerprint sensor technology, and biometric smart cards, which he called “[t]he area in which we foresee the greatest potential in the years immediately ahead”. Fredrikson said that business volumes in this area will be “modest” in 2019 as various stakeholders test the available technological solutions, but that Fingerprints’ leadership “expect to see a broader commercial launch in 2020.”

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October 29, 2018 – by Alex Perala