by Shane Henson — November 15, 2013—According to a new report on the radio-frequency identification (RFID) sector by IDTechEx Research, the RFID market will increase from $6.98 billion in 2012 to $7.88 billion in 2013, and will reach $23.4 billion in 2020. This includes tags, readers and software/services for RFID cards, labels, fobs, and all other form factors for both passive and active RFID.
Per the report, RFID Forecasts, Players and Opportunities 2014—2024, the market for RFID has grown steadily despite the economic meltdown due to the diverse nature of its applications, from tagging retail apparel to transport ticketing to animals. Historically and today, governments have driven most RFID orders as they improve efficiency (transit systems), safety (passport tagging), and protective industries (animal tagging). Since 2000, there has been a strong push to use passive RFID to improve supply chain visibility, with a wide range of investment in new RFID technologies, new standards and much publicity.
The graph shows total RFID market projections in U.S. billions.
(Click on image to enlarge)
IDTechEx notes that the last five years have seen consolidation throughout the value chain in passive ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID, with some companies emerging in true phoenix-from-ashes style. This is mainly driven by one application—retail apparel—which will globally demand 2.25 billion RFID labels in 2013. After apparel tagging, passive UHF is deployed in many different application areas for asset tracking and other applications. These are small volumes in their own right but add up to hundreds of millions of tags per year given the strong payback they give users, notes the company. IDTechEx Research expects 3.1 billion passive UHF RFID tags to be sold in 2013.
Despite passive UHF selling more tags than passive HF for the first time in 2012, IDTechEx Research finds that the money spent on passive UHF tags in 2013 will be $247 million, versus $2.15 billion on HF and $713 million on low-frequency (LF) RFID tags. The higher value of HF and LF is due to a variety of RFID tags in high-value applications, including animal tagging, contactless smart cards and passports, the company says.
IDTechEx Research also notes that in a business approaching $8 billion this year, researchers expected to find leaders within the market earning at least one billion in sales, but did not. Of the 800 or so suppliers, IDTechEx only counted eight with revenues of more than $100 million, and less than twenty with sales between $20 million to $100 million.
