Raghu Das, CEO IDTechEx

What is your estimation of the market potential for RFID?
In 2009, IDTechEx found that the value of the entire RFID market will be $5.56 billion, up from $5.25 billion in 2008. This includes tags, readers and software/services for RFID cards, labels, fobs and all other forms. The majority - $2.99 billion - is spent on RFID cards and their associated services. By 2019, IDTechEx expects that the RFID market will grow by five times its current value to reach $27.59 billion.

What industries will profit the most from using the technology? And who are the pioneers at the moment?
Pioneers at the moment are fashion and apparel retailers as well as governments for transit and animal-tagging applications. There are many other smaller projects occurring in a huge range of different industry sectors. However, the biggest potential of using RFID to add new services for consumers has yet to be realized in a major way.

Has the economic downturn affected the future prospects of RFID?
Our forecasts have taken into account the global economic slow down. Looking at the range of applications, the biggest projects, which tend to be government led and are usually profitable for suppliers involved, are unlikely to be discontinued. For example, governments will not stop tagging passports or cattle to save money. More and more cities around the world are migrating to using RFID cards and eventually RFID tickets and RFID enabled cellphones for transit. The U.S. military recently awarded an order involving RFID that was worth nearly half a billion dollars. Governments do not need a fast return on investment (ROI). They seek error prevention, improved customer service and efficiency and greater security.

Industry, however, usually seeks rapid ROI. RFID is being applied where it can demonstrate a fairly rapid return on investment - such as apparel tracking, manufacturing, asset tracking, book tagging, etc. Those intending to supply the highest volumes of tags for open markets have had to diversify into closed-loop applications. Given the economic situation, some RFID projects will be delayed, but other companies will use this to their advantage and adopt RFID because the paybacks are compelling for competitive advantage and to increase sales. However, it is still very rare for any one company to buy more than 5 million RFID labels in any one implementation.

What are the biggest threats and challenges for the technology?
These are varied depending on the application. Usually, the technology MUST be able to achieve adequate read rates which most expect to be 100%. If that is achieved, then the cost of tags and infrastructure and sharing of costs in open systems seem to be the stumbling blocks.

When do you think RFID will become a mainstream application?
I think it already is in many sectors such as transit, ID, secure access, etc. It is steadily growing in asset-tracking applications but these are fragmented and typically small projects. We forecast that in 2019, less than 10% of all consumer items will have an RFID tag. That percentage is small, but it represents a huge market worth almost $30 billion.

Organization:
IDTechEx provides consulting, research and analysis of printed electronics, RFID and RFID applications in a variety of industries. The company's work includes technology and market benchmarking, analysis of companies, due diligence, training and global research.

Link:
www.idtechex.com