News
ICMA Global Market Survey Indicates Economic Recession
Continues to Impact Card Manufacturing Industry
The International Card Manufacturers Association (ICMA), a global non-profit association for card manufacturers, personalizers, issuers and suppliers, announced the results of its annual Global Market Survey. The survey provides an in-depth look into the global card industry, measuring the number of cards manufactured by geographic and market segment volumes in units and dollars.
The survey measured results from 2009 and revealed the global economic recession continues to interrupt growth throughout the industry, with 19.2 billion cards manufactured globally, indicating a slight decrease of 1.0 percent from 19.4 billion in 2008. The survey also revealed the dollar market increased by 5.2 percent from $9.7 billion in 2008 to $10.2 billion in 2009.
Despite being down 1.7 percent from 2008, North America held its position as the largest producer of cards, with more than 8.7 billion cards manufactured in 2009. The Asia Pacific region continues to grow with 5.2 billion units manufactured, up 5.4 percent from 2008. Europe remained in the third position with 3.9 billion units manufactured, followed by Latin America with somewhat less than one billion units manufactured and the Middle East/Africa (MEA) with half a billion units manufactured.
The regions surveyed were North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and MEA. The products surveyed were all plastic cards including traditional cards—with and without magnetic stripe, and chip cards that include contact, contactless and dual interface cards for diverse applications such as financial, identification, telecom and transit.
Also analyzed, regional demographics and card-specific statistics such as market share for value-based secure cards, financial hologram cards, other cards, those cards that do not have monetary value, and financial other cards, those cards that do not use a hologram.
The results of the survey are available to ICMA members on the ICMA website at www.icma.com. Non-members can purchase the survey for $1500 and obtain information on becoming a member of ICMA by contacting Lynn McCullough at 609-799-4900 or lmccullough@icma.com.
About the Survey