In recent years, Fingerprints has followed a clear strategy to reduce its share of capacitive fingerprint sensor sales primarily to Chinese mobile manufacturers. The share of these has fallen from 90% in 2021 to 74% in 2023. Even though sales recovered after plummeting on account of the pandemic and component crisis, gross margins did not follow suit. As the company does not believe this profitability can pick up, it has decided to discontinue the segment. Development will end with immediate effect, while customer activity will lag this somewhat. It remains unclear whether the technology will be sold, but the company stated on its conference call that discussions are ongoing.

Excluding Mobile, Fingerprints saw SEK211m in sales in 2023. PC accounted for 46%, Access for 37%, and Payments for 17%. As Mobile is discontinued, the other businesses should accelerate. Given the ever-increasing cyber-threats, the biometrics market is attractive, growing 14% a year. Biometric penetration is expanding within PC, and consider that HP, for example, is not a customer. Other areas with solid growth potential are the automotive sector – where iris technology is expected to have a major impact – and biometric payment cards.

A healthy and natural move, in our view