ID Cards - Riding the Waves of the ID Industry

Any ID Card business is a bit like surfing. We look for opportunities, or 'waves', that drive the business forward. Sometimes the sea is a bit calm, and we have to create our own 'waves'. We also look forward, and this means that we create and follow a 5-year strategy, which we have just completed for this year.

Market Growth

We predict that the ID card printing market will continue to grow strongly over the next few years, with printer volume sales increasing, driven by the growing need for security and personal identification. A large part of the growth is driven by smaller companies now buying ID card printers, where previously they may have used a bureau service, or may not have had any ID at all. Also, global companies are now using ID cards across the world, whether it's in their Shanghai or Tokyo or San Francisco or Mexico City office. We are also seeing growth in government projects - more on this below.

The move to provide smaller, easier-to-use, models has been a theme of the industry over the last 2 or 3 years, and ID card printers are now easier to use than the average ink-jet printer.

The Need for Higher Security

A lot of industry attention recently has been on high-profile National ID Card projects or other Government projects like Drivers Licenses, Benefit cards and Immigration cards. This is being driven by a number of factors:

- Government are realizing that many of their existing credentials are not secure.
- The move to E-Passports is laying the groundwork for new ID cards. If a government is going to build a national database and infrastructure for E-Passports, then that can be equally applied to ID cards. A lot of the technology, like the biometrics, the chips in the passport or card, and the visual security, is very similar across passports and ID cards.

What this means is of course the use of biometric ID cards, often using 2 or more biometric techniques, and requiring advanced smart cards to store and secure the information. As the ID Cards are often used for many years, and sometimes in high usage environments, laminated cards are usually required.

These government projects are also spinning off into the commercial world, with airports, transport organizations, and others, looking to adopt the new cards for their own security.

So, the market is going 2 ways:

- Smaller companies wanting simple, good-value ID card badging solutions.
- Government organizations and larger companies wanting secure solutions for printing and encoding smart cards.

Of course, there is still a very large middle-market including medium to large companies, universities, health & leisure and other applications.

ID Card Printing is not a Commodity - Support is the Difference

Whether it's the small company just starting out, or the large organization on their fourth generation of ID Card, printing ID cards is just a part of what our users need to do. They also need to encode smart cards (contactless or contact chip cards), they need to capture card holders information for security purposes, and they need to do this again and again.

Conclusions

We are seeing growth in smaller companies, also in government projects. Overall, there is continued healthy growth in almost all ID markets.

Sometimes the waves throw us some challenges, and keeping up with new smart card technologies and standards is certainly one of them, but these challenges are good in order to keep the industry active, and to find new applications for ID cards.