FPC Share Trading Resumes Today After March 20th Halt

Fingerprint Cards is denying that it offered price sensitive information in a call with analysts on March 19th. Allegations of the wrongdoing prompted Nasdaq Stockholm to halt trading of the company’s stock the following day.

Pareto Securities asserts that, in the call, FPC representatives had said that forecasts for the firm’s results were too high. In a statement issued on March 20th, FPC insisted that “[i]n accordance with applicable regulations,” the company “has not communicated price sensitive information in analyst meetings, nor has the company commented on analyst estimates.” FPC proceeded to suggest that comments its representatives made on the capacitive fingerprint sensor market in general were misconstrued by the analysts.

Asserting that these same observations were made in its recent year-end fiscal update, FPC said it had noted in the analyst call that it expects sales in the China smartphone market to continue to weaken in Q1 of this year after a downward trend last year; that it expects the smartphone fingerprint sensor market to decline over the coming year; and that it “has launched a number of activities” to attain “long-term improvement in profitability”.

Perhaps most prominent among those activities is FPC’s effort to develop facial recognition technology, which the company announced on the 19th. The downturn observed in the smartphone fingerprint sensor market is thought by many to be the result of an industry shift toward facial recognition in the wake of last autumn’s launch of the iPhone X, which replaced fingerprint scanning with face scanning for user authentication.

Trading of FPC shares resumes on the Nasdaq Stockholm today.

Sources: Reuters, Fingerprint Cards

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March 21, 2018 – by Alex Perala