September 29, 2005
The market for RFID
According to a research by IDTechEX, the market for RFID tags and systems will touch $ 24.50 billion by 2015. The growth will occur as a result of consumer demand and new regulations. The major applications that utilize RFID include access cards across industries, libraries, healthcare, etc. By 2006, pallet and case level tagging will require 3.1 billion tags. By 2008, item level tagging will consume around 6.8 billion tags.
EPC interrogators will account for a sale of $ 1.14 billion dollars in 2008 whereas other interrogators such as Near Field Communication interrogators will account for sales worth $ 0.75 billion.
By 2010, East Asia will emerge as a dominant consumer of RFID tags. 48% of the tags in terms of units will be required in East Asia. 32% of the total number will be used in the US. Approximately 10 trillion barcodes are printed every year. Even by the most optimistic estimate, RFID tags cannot touch these numbers before 2020. For RFID tags to touch these numbers, they will have to sell at less than one cent per tag and they should be entirely printed.
Tags available for one cent each may not be a profitable proposition with silicon, which is the reason why companies such as IBM, Xerox, Samsung, etc are working on “chipless” tags using polymer transistor circuits and Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) techniques. The main markets for one-cent chipless tags include Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) with a market for trillions of tags, postal departments with a potential for around 650 billion tags and books with a requirement of around 50 billion tags annually.
Even though companies such as Hewlett Packard and IBM are working on the issues related to UHF tagging, it will be some time before UHF tagging at the item-level can reach the figures of pallet- and case-level tagging. Most item-level tagging requirements are satisfied with the 13.56 MHz waveband and the range provided by UHF tags is rarely required.
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