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While the initial adoption was driven by mandates, whether Walmart or FDA or DoD mandates, the adopters now are beginning to go for wider deployments based on business requirements and addressing the pain areas. Additionally, the hype around RFID is on the wane, bringing more realistic expectations with focus on developing wider applications.

Whos Keen?
Among the verticals that have evinced interest in RFID are manufacturing, transport and logistics, retail, pharma, hospitals, etc. Asset tracking is expected to emerge as the leading RFID application in the Indian market. Besides, security and access control remains one of the mainstream applications.

The initial applications in the retail segment are building up around asset tracking, supply chain automation (shipping and receiving automation), inventory management, out of stock management, fresh item management of perishables, and promotion execution.

Market Predictions
Research firm IDTechEx predicts the RFID market value to touch $27.88 bn in 2017. According to the firms 2007 update on its annual 10 year forecast on the RFID market, the total RFID market value (including all hardware, systems, integration, etc) across all countries will be $4.96 bn. The largest piece of the market will be RFID cards, contributing $2.99 bn. The remaining $1.97 bn will come from non-card RFID (eg RFID labels, fobs, tickets, etc). It further predicts 1.71 bn tags will be sold in 2007 with case- and pallet-tagging, driven largely by US mandates, contributing 420 mn units.

In adoption of RFID technology, the Indian market is still in the pilot stage, and trailing behind North American and European counterparts. However, the year 2007 will witness growth in RFID adoption.

Towards Standardization
A lot of innovations and significant developments in RFID have been happening in the area of improving reader/tag performance. A significant development in this area has been the formulation of the EPCglobal Inc-ratified, Class-1 Gen-2 standards. Perceptions of high capital costs, low read rates, and uncertainty around standards had been some of the factors dampening the technologys adoption in the country. However, with Gen-2 having become widely available, many low read rate issues have gone away, and the uncertainty around standards has also been resolved to a large extent.

The most significant impact of the Gen-2 standards has been on the cost of RFID hardware. Other benefits include faster, improved and more flexible read and write speed, higher reliability in tag counting, more robust performance of many readers in close proximity, enhanced security and extensibility to higher-function tags and systems. The emphasis has also moved from the physics of RFID to the RFID-enabled applications.

Among the other technology trends shaping up the RFID market are; integrated small form factor RFID reader, high memory capacity RFID tag, interfacing UHF reader in POS, and handheld terminal. Small foot printer UHF RFID reader with Zigbee wireless interconnectivity is the latest innovation.

Shipra Malhotra
shipram@cybermedia.co.in

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