Beancounters working for Berg Insight have noted a growth in global sales of handsets featuring Near Field Communication (NFC) increased ten-fold in 2011.

More than 30 million units were sold in 2011 and the market was growing at a compound annual growth rate of 87.8 percent. It predicts that shipments will reach 700 million units in 2016. The global rise in smartphone adoption is also driving higher attach rates for other wireless connectivity technologies in handsets including GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN, the report said.

Some of the reason for the growth is the reduction in the cost of the technology. It is now a staple  feature on high-end smartphones and most medium- and low-end models. Declining costs will also enable broader integration in the featurephone segment that is rapidly gaining smartphone-like functionality.

Shipments of WLAN-enabled handsets have more or less doubled annually in the past four years and the attach rate increased to 33 percent in 2011. WLAN connectivity in handsets enables a range of use cases including offloading data traffic from increasingly congested mobile networks, media synchronisation and indoor navigation services, the report said.