RFID Market to Reach US$5.63 Billion

According to the research details of IDTechEx, the whole RFID market is stipulated to reach US$5.63 billion by the end of this year.

The consultancy firm states that the market will flourish from US$5.03 billion in 2009 to reach the extravagant figure. This will include tags, readers and software/services for RFID cards, labels, fobs and all other form factors.

The report of IDTechEx, ‘RFID Forecasts, Players & Opportunities 2011-2021,’ revealed that the highest spendthrifts are still the governments, who are able to implement great RFID schemes such as people identification, animal tagging and transit ticketing where the paybacks are virtually higher efficiency and improved safety.

“Rapid ROI is less of a concern for them,” said the report’s author, Raghu Das.

According to the IDTechEx research data, the largest sectors by numbers of tags are contact less cards utilizing 450 million tags, next RFID tickets which use 380 million tags, and finally the apparel with 300 million tags.

By value, just over US$1 billion is going to be spent on RFID cards in 2010 and US$240 million on tags for passports. US$36 million will be spent on tags for apparel in total.

In 2010 43% of RFID tags are going to be sold and used in North America. In the coming years according to IDTechEx RFID is supposed to be huge in China.

“Indicators of this include the fact that China has been adding new RFID manufacturing capacity while the US and Europe saw a shakeout in tag providers,” siad Das.

“The Chinese Government is a strong advocate for RFID, and has the power to mandate companies to use it; China has already executed the largest RFID order by value (more than one billion national identification cards for adults - six billion dollars including systems) and has a policy of making its own requirements throughout the RFID value chain; in 2009/2010, RFID events in China are five times bigger by attendance than the biggest RFID events in the US and Europe; and finally most products will be source tagged, and because China is one of the largest exporters the tags will be supplied there.”, he continued.