Company: AWRE
Filing Date: 2025-03-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-038714
Chunk: 21

Company: AWARE INC /MA/
Filing Date: 2025-03-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 21
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 or will compete directly with our offerings.  We believe that additional competitors will enter the biometrics market and become significant long-term competitors, and that, as a result, competition will increase.  Companies competing with us may introduce solutions that are competitively priced, have increased performance or functionality or incorporate technological advances we have not yet developed or implemented. Our current principal competitors include: 

•Diversified technology providers that offer integrated biometrics solutions to governments, law enforcement agencies and other organizations.  This group of competitors includes companies such as Idemia, Thales, and NEC.

•Component providers that offer biometrics software and hardware components for fingerprint, facial, iris and voice biometric identification.  This group of competitors includes companies such as FaceTec, iProov, and Innovatrics.

We expect competition to intensify in the near term in the biometrics market. Many current and potential competitors have substantially greater financial, marketing, and research resources than we have.  Moreover, low-cost foreign competitors from developing economies and other countries have demonstrated a willingness to sell their products at significantly reduced prices. To compete effectively in this environment, we must continually develop and market new and enhanced solutions and technologies at competitive prices and must have the resources available to invest in significant research and development activities. Our failure to compete successfully could cause our revenues and market share to decline. 

10

The biometrics industry is characterized by rapid technological change and evolving industry standards, which could render our existing products obsolete. 

Our future success will depend upon our ability to develop and introduce a variety of new capabilities and enhancements to our existing products in order to address the changing and sophisticated needs of the marketplace. Frequently, technical development programs in the biometrics industry require assessments to be made of the future direction of technology, which is inherently difficult to predict. Delays in introducing new products and enhancements, the failure to choose correctly among technical alternatives or the failure to offer innovative products or enhancements at competitive prices may cause customers to forego purchases of our products and purchase our competitors’ products. We may not have adequate resources available to us or may not adequately keep pace with appropriate requirements in order to effectively compete in the marketplace.

Our software products may have errors, defects or bugs, which could result in delayed or lost revenue, expensive correction, liability to our customers, and claims against us. 

Despite testing, complex software products such as ours may contain errors, defects, or bugs, which may only be discovered after they have been installed and used by our customers.  Defects in