NFC TimesThe premier source for news, analysis and commentary on
Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Co-creator of NFC with Sony and still the dominant supplier of contactless chips for transit cards worldwide, the Netherlands-based chip maker has taken a few hits of late.

The economic downturn soured revenue in 2008 and 2009, especially for NXP’s consumer electronics and automobiles. And its aging Mifare Classic technology used in hundreds of millions of cheap and plentiful contactless transport cards worldwide suffered well-publicized but inevitable hacks in 2008. Delays in NFC rollouts upended NXP’s rosy sales projections for the technology in 2008 and 2009 in NXP’s identification division. And in Janaury 2010, rivals Infineon Technologies and Inside Contactless announced with the Nos. 2 and 3 card vendors a plan to offer "open-standard" chips for transit cards using an Infineon-developed authentication scheme that would directly compete with Mifare.

But as 2010 closed out, NXP appeared to be in the driver's seat in the NFC market. The chip vendor scored a coup with its announcement that Google would be using its NFC chips and NFC protocol software stack in its new Nexus S and latest Android operating system for smartphones. Samsung Electronics, maker of the Nexus S, later announced it would incorporate NFC (using chips from NXP) in its Galaxy S II smartphone.

And key Mifare customer Transport for London was apparently sticking with NXP by upgrading to the chip supplier's top-of-the line DESFire technology for its huge transit-ticketing scheme, Oyster. 

With Sony the past few years focusing on the non-NFC contactless wallet phone market in Japan, NXP got its NFC chips in the first three NFC phones from market-leader Nokia, used mostly for trials.

NXP abandoned the idea of selling NFC services and transferred its Mifare4Mobile application management unit to card vendor Gemalto in 2009, but held the rights to the intellectual property.
 
In banking cards, NXP’s SmartMX is used for dual-interface chips used on EMV contactless cards in Europe and beyond. The vendor finally introduced a contactless chip for the U.S contactless bank-card market in mid-2009.