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Pumping Up the RFID Tag Volume

2010 turned out to be a tremendous year for RFID, with success stories coming from nearly every facet of the industry, but the underlying theme and a primary indicator of success for many of these stories is the increase in tag volume.  More tags typically means that the solution is scaling and/or expanding, the enterprise is increasingly leveraging the system and the level of commitment to the technology is rising.  

Tag volumes are expected to exceed 3.7 Billion units in 2010, a jump of more than 35% over 2009, and are anticipated to approach 12.5 Billion by the end of 2014.  Most of this growth is coming from the HF and EPC UHF markets.  These two markets accounted for approximately 78% of the total global tag volume in 2009 and are predicted to represent more than 90% of global volume by 2014.  That means that more than 30 Billion HF and EPC UHF tags will be shipped from over the next 4 years.

What applications are driving this growth?  The following table provides a few highlights of transponder volumes by leading RFID applications.

APPLICATION

HF

EPC UHF

2009 (Millions of Units)

CAGR (2009-2014)

2009 (Millions of Units)

CAGR (2009-2014)

    Animal Tracking

25.9

45.1%

0.6

121.8%

    Asset Tracking

37.2

21.7%

34.6

70.2%

    AVI/Toll Collection

19.4

18.3%

16.0

64.4%

    Baggage Handling

N/A

N/A

104.6

36.9%

    Contactless Payment

55.4

38.1%

N/A

N/A

    Customer Loyalty

1.7

45.2%

N/A

N/A

    Document Tracking

21.3

32.2%

3.1

90.4%

    ID/e-Government

270.7

16.2%

N/A

N/A

    Library

105.7

20.1%

0.1

207.9%

    Rental Item Tracking

36.4

31.0%

14.5

75.3%

    RTLS/LBS

23.6

17.7%

9.0

77.2%

    Security/Access Control

716.3

14.5%

N/A

N/A

    Sensing/Monitoring

1.6

31.2%

1.9

125.1%

    Shop-floor Automation

25.9

24.6%

14.8

80.4%

    Supply Chain

105.0

15.1%

276.8

73.0%

    Ticketing

301.8

24.9%

1.0

82.6%

    WIP

30.2

23.3%

7.9

94.1%

    Other

64.6

42.2%

17.7

116.1%

So to sum it up in 1 phrase, I’d say that RFID tag volumes for HF and EPC applications appear to be cranked up to 11!