The top executive of Fingerprint Cards expects seven or eight of the world’s biggest smartphone makers to offer fingerprint recognition technology from 2014 in a race to defend market share and keep up with trend-setter Apple. Following Apple’s September launch of the iPhone 5S – the first smartphone to include a fingerprint identity sensor – the Swedish company hopes to ramp up revenues by selling its sensors to other top mobile phone makers like Samsung, LG Electronics and Huawei. “I think at least seven or eight will launch a phone with a touch sensor in 2014,” Johan Carlstrom, Fingerprint’s Chief Executive Officer, told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. Fingerprint Cards hopes to clinch contracts with “the majority” of those firms, he said.