IDTechEx predicts explosion in RFID market
than over the previous 60 years since their invention, claims a new
report from technology analyst IDTechEx.
Primarily this will be because retailers such as are demanding, for the first time, that suppliers fit tags to pallets and cases to save cost and improve service but many other applications will be growing very rapidly. This exponential growth will continue and, by 2015, the value of sales of RFID tags will have increased by thirteen times over the figure for 2005.
The IDTechEx report, entitled RFID Forecasts, Players and Opportunities analyses the rapidly growing and diversifying market for Radio Frequency Identification RFID. The total value of this market, including systems and service, will rocket from $1.95 billion in 2005 to $26.9 billion in 2015.
Primarily, this will be driven by another new and dramatic development. This will be the tagging of high volume items - notably consumer goods - at the request of retailers and postal authorities, and also for legal reasons. In these cases, the primary benefits sought will be broader and include cost, increased sales, improved safety, reduced crime and improved customer service.
In addition though, many experts believe that manufacturers and suppliers will begin to see benefits in installing RFID. Such technology can be integrated to help suppliers go beyond compliance and realise investment returns within their own supply chains.
This is a vital consideration to suppliers and manufacturers under pressure to realise better cost margins. A recent report carried out by Deloitte Research for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), suggest that rather than taking a holistic, global view of their businesses, most global manufacturers focus on addressing the individual pieces of their far-flung global network - the complex web of suppliers, production facilities, distribution centres and customers - that comprise their supply chain.
IDTechEx claims that the report provides a unique analysis of the RFID market, and offers projections for issues such as label vs non label, EPC vs non- EPC, active vs passive and chip vs chipless. It also assesses markets by geographical region, application, tag format and tag location.
Major players now and in future in the various parts of the value chain are identified and important trends are analysed, such as the ability of RFID technology to deal with livestock and food traceability in the face of new laws, bioterrorism, avian flu and BSE.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, which hooks miniature antennas up to tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track items at a distance, is being driven hard by retailers such as Metro, which see RFID as the natural replacement of industry's current bar code-based tracking systems. This will allow companies to automatically track inventory throughout an entire supply chain.
Information from RFID-tagged cases on a pallet can be read automatically using fixed, mobile or handheld readers rather than requiring individual bar code scanning.
