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Global RFID market to hit $7.46bn

Tarryn Giebelmann
By Tarryn Giebelmann, Sub-Editor
Johannesburg, 19 Jul 2012

Global RFID market to hit $7.46bn

The latest RFID market research from IDTechEx finds that, in 2012, the value of the entire RFID market will be $7.46 billion, up from $6.37 billion in 2011, IDTechEx reports.

This includes tags, readers and software/services for RFID cards, labels, fobs and all other form factors.

In many applicational sectors, RFID orders are up 10% - some much more. Primarily this is due to growth of passive UHF systems for tagging apparel and many closed loop applications.

It is also driven by governments doing two things. Increasingly, they make it a legal requirement to fit RFID, recent examples being on animals in New Zealand and Europe. Secondly, they come up with huge sums of money to buy RFID. This varies from local governments committing to non-stop road tolling and library tagging, to national governments increasingly buying national ID cards, passports and other forms of RFID. However, military spending on RFID is down from previous highs.

Business Weekly quotes IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das as saying: “In retail, RFID is seeing rapid growth for apparel tagging - this application alone demands one billion RFID labels in 2012, with 1.35 billion tags forecast for 2013. RFID in the form of tickets used for transit will demand 500 million tags in 2012.

“In total, 3.98 billion tags will be sold in 2012 versus 2.93 billion in 2011. Most of the growth is from passive UHF RFID labels, however, at that frequency, suppliers are still barely profitable so far.

“At the start of 2012, the cumulative number of RFID tags sold over the last 65 years was 15.1 billion: 20% of that number were sold in 2011.”

In a separate report, GIA forecast the global market for RFID in healthcare and pharmaceuticals to reach $1.7 billion by 2018, the San Francisco Chronicle writes.

Major factors driving growth in the market include additional functionality offered by RFID as against conventional technologies, technological advances and rising issues of counterfeiting and re-labelling of expired drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. Growth in the market is also being fuelled by increasing adoption of the technology in countries such as the US and South Korea and the drive to minimise operational losses.

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