“Contactless smart ticketing used to be adopted only by those large “flag ship” cities across the world," said ABI Research practice director John Devlin. "We are now starting to see contactless ticketing solutions adopted by smaller towns and cities, who realize the benefits and potential ROI’s contactless technology can achieve. For example, the transport authorities within Newcastle, Bradford, and Manchester in the UK are all looking into contactless ticketing adoption, inspired by the London Oyster card."

Recent market developments have led to increased attention to new ticketing solutions, paving the way for the possible beginnings of an international standard in the form of EMV, NFC, and new specifications set out by the Open Standard for Public Transport (OSPT) for an open standards solution.The OSPT continues its quest in penetrating the market with CiPurse product and has certainly had a successful 2012, completing pilots and trials worldwide, leading to two ongoing commercial deployments of CiPurse cards across two transport authorities believed to be located in Europe and Latin America.

"The CiPurse solution has made good progress in 2012," said research analyst Phil Sealy. "At ABI Research we strongly believe that a robust and flexible product range will increase its appeal. Despite the CiPurse contract wins, it is important not to get carried away. The OSPT is certainly in its infancy in terms of its specifications and commercially available solutions. Added competition from the OSPT is healthy for a growing transportation market, but it is not expected to challenge NXP’s market share ranking over the mid-term."

Those that stand to benefit from increased CiPurse adoption include austriamicrosystems, Ecebs, G&D, Infineon, Inside Secure, Oberthur, Samsung, Smartrac, Openticketing, and Watchdata, all of whom are members of the OSPT Alliance. Adding a CiPurse product range to G&D, Watchdata and Oberthur’s portfolios could help them challenge ASK’s dominant position as the leading smart card ticketing provider.

The overall market continues to grow at a double digit rate, enabling the market to sustain business for new entrants, whilst allowing those already active and dominant to maintain a strong position.

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