On Friday, NEXT Biometrics announced that it has received an initial purchase order for 50,000 area sensors from a partner in the Chinese market. Every unit is slated for delivery before the end of 2014.
The partner, who is kept anonymous in the announcement (standard industry practice), is described by NEXT as a leader in solutions for Chinese banking and corporate markets. The order comes after a long period of testing and product development.
NEXT CEO Tore Etholm-Idsøe is pleased with the new partnership.
“Their strongholds within banking and major corporate market segments in China represents a significant opportunity for NEXT,” he says. “The fact that NEXT sensors are significantly lower cost than any other credible sized sensors represents major opportunities for market expansions.”
The low cost of NEXT’s sensors has made them attractive to a number of partners including fingerprint authentication specialist BIO-key, who strategically teamed up with the manufacturer earlier this year.
Indeed, the price of production of NEXT’s sensors is being lowered even as I type this brief. Reuters announced this morning that NEXT has completed the acceptance test of a custom built, high capacity coating machine.
Thanks to this new machine, from now on it will only cost NEXT 10 cents to coat a sensor, a process that used to run the company over a dollar per unit. The machine will also increase coating capacity, allowing NEXT to coat 1.8 million sensors per month – a vast improvement over 100,000 per month production capacity at which it once sat.
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November 24, 2014 – by Peter B. Counter
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