A Volume Business

摘要

It was a buyer's market for smart card chips last year and the bargains have continued through the first half of 2005. Prices plunged by about 30% or more across all memory sizes, most market observers agree. That translates into lower costs and higher profit margins for card vendors. They pass on at least some of the price cuts to their customers, the card issuers. Prices for finished smart cards do not appear to be falling as quickly as for chips, however. The decreases have come mainly in chips used for subscriber identity module cards for mobile phones. That has been despite soaring demand for SIM cards, which reached nearly 1.1 billion SIMs in 2004, an increase of more than 50% from 2003, card vendors estimate. The biggest increases have come in shipments of low-memory SIMs for mobile network operators in developing countries.