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NXP Semiconductors NV plans to sell its business unit that provides software and services for its Mifare contactless application for mobile phones to France-based smart card vendor Gemalto NV. The deal, announced Friday for an undisclosed sum, would send a small team of France-based engineers and other personnel to Gemalto along with the applications and platform they developed to deliver Mifare over the air to mobile phones that support Near Field Communication. The Mifare protocol, owned by NXP, is the most-used application worldwide for transit fare-collection cards. Mobile-network operators and other mobile-commerce players predict Mifare will be one of the first applications to run on NFC phones once they hit the market, possibly next year. The NXP team had been working on software that complies with its own Mifare4Mobile specification. "The idea was to stimulate the mobile-network operators and card manufacturers with an offer where you manage Mifare applications on the mobile phone," an NXP spokesperson tells CardLine Global sister publication Cards&Payments. "We decided this is not our core business." The Netherlands-based NXP mainly produces chips for the NFC market and will continue to do so, he says. Gemalto, the world's largest supplier of SIM cards for mobile phones based on the number of cards shipped, would help push Mifare to the NFC market, the spokesperson adds. "Gemalto lifts this application one step up in a value chain," says the spokesperson. "They are dealing with the mobile-network operators." Gemalto could have developed the software itself. To encourage more companies to put Mifare on mobile phones, NXP in October said it would license the Mifare4Mobile specification to all companies for free, as long as the Mifare application itself ran on a SIM chip or a secure-embedded chip in the NFC phones for which the chipmakers would pay royalties. The card vendor had developed NFC-management platforms for mobile bank payment and other transit-ticketing protocols but had not done so yet for Mifare, Jérôme Sion, Gemalto mobile contactless services director, tells Cards&Payments "The point with this acquisition is to acquire the expertise and also the first implementation that allows us to address customers rapidly," he says. NXP says it will retain the intellectual property rights to the Mifare4Mobile specification. NXP says it will play a "central role" in upgrading the specification and will "ensure Mifare is available on a broad basis and on a nondiscriminatory basis to all market players."
