IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase Passes 4000 RFID Projects
By a big margin. the world's largest database of RFID projects is the IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase. It has just surpassed 4000 projects in 111 countries. Containing technical details, descriptive text, 770 company RFID slide shows and audio, the knowledgebase covers 4050 companies from suppliers to users. It autogenerates graphs of analysis giving unique insight into why, where and how the RFID market has quintupled in the last few years and, with all those trials and rollouts, it will triple in the next ten years. Mainly, the RFID market is driven by government military, road tolling, healthcare and other investment and government legislation to tag animals through to passports. The Knowledgebase reveals how China and the USA vie for the largest expenditure on RFID but with very different priorities, how the UK and Germany have a large number of projects but Japan spends more heavily on a smaller number of projects.
Contrary to much that is written on the subject of RFID, most of the project concern tagging of items. The most rapidly growing number of projects relate to active RFID These concern such factors as buying things with mobile phones, Wireless Mesh Networks that self organise and self heal and Real Time Locating Systems. Selling value is the winning strategy not dumping passive tags. Most of the projects are full rollouts - this is not all about trials and disappointment. Following completion of the $6B national identity card scheme in China based on passive cards, no other passive RFID order comes close. The percentage of active RFID projects in the knowledgebase has now leapt to 40% and involving orders of up to $0.5B. Despite the commendable publicity and well rehearsed success of UHF RFID, by far the largest expenditure and nmber of projects remain with HF RFID - all those passports and nearly all of the library assets, tickets and cards for example. Despite the fact that highest volume RFID will only be achieved with the most basic, read only tags, under 40% of projects involve read only and progress towards tagging everything in the supermarket, in healthcare or the postal service is poor.
The Financial, Security, Safety sector has the largest number of projects and although Retail and Consumer Goods comes second in number of projects it is number three - Passenger Transport and Automotive and, a whisker behind, Logistics, are where the big money is spent. Although most RFID tags - by far - are labels now, most active RFID tags are plastic mouldings and the most money is spent on passive RFID cards. In number of projects, the order is labels, cards then plastic mouldings.
IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das says, "We constantly update this searchable database. Getting information about the USA is easy but, for most other countries, the intensive travelling by our team is essential in gathering these data. In particular, you only learn about the China by going there. They are tagging everything from cheques to fishing boats, and they are providing new city card and innovating heavily on RFID. This is largely missed by observers in the West. Another poorly publicised area is the legislation requiring European livestock to be tagged. Little is written about this and Google searches and RFID conferences and newsletters are a disappointment on this subject."
For more information, see http://www.rfidbase.com. Attendees to RFID Europe, held in Cambridge in September (http://www.IDTechEx.com.RFIDEurope) receive 6 months free access to the RFID knowledgebase.
SOURCE: IDTechEx