Apple IPhone Rumor Boosts Biometrics Companies

Touchscreen technology’s big break came in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone. The popularity of Apple’s smartphone—with an interface that allowed quick, intuitive Web browsing—led most competitors to quickly adopt the technology, reshaping the industry around pinches and swipes. With the next iPhone model widely expected by analysts to carry a fingerprint reader, makers of biometric security devices are enjoying big jumps in their share prices. Investors are betting that other phone manufacturers will quickly adopt physical identifiers to replace conventional passwords and signatures.

Apple bought fingerprint-sensor maker AuthenTec for $350 million last year. Shortly after, the newly acquired company stopped selling its products to Apple competitors, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, and mobile archrival Samsung. Apple will unveil a new iteration of the iPhone next month, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans who wasn’t authorized to discuss them publicly. ABI Research and KGI Securities Thailand are among the market research firms that say the device will include a fingerprint reader to speed electronic payments and retrieval of music, documents, and other files from remote cloud storage. Apple declined to comment. “We think iPhone will continue to lead Android phones and Windows Phone by a wide margin in fingerprint-sensing technology and design,” KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in an Aug. 10 research note. “As such, Apple will likely be able to offer users a more secure and more intuitive way to conduct mobile payment transactions and access cloud computing services.”