Cambridge UK track and trace technology ace Ubisense has been tipped as a key player in a burgeoning global RFID (radio frequency identification) market tipped to be worth over £26 billion in the next 10 years.

The Cambridge tech market intel specialist IDTechEx has produced a blockbusting report that shows the RFID market reaching $7.67 billion in 2012 – 17 per cent up from 2011. But that haul will more than triple within a decade, it says.

And IDTechEx CEO, Raghu Das, reveals to Business Weekly that the report lists Ubisense as world class and on the inside track.

He says: “In Cambridge, one of the global leaders in an aspect of RFID is Ubisense. Ubisense, now a listed company, has become the leader in ultra-wideband systems providing real time location capability.”

IDTechEx says there is especially rapid growth in the apparel and animal tagging sectors.

The IDTechEx report covers the next decade. It says the boom will embrace tags, readers and software/services for RFID cards, labels, fobs and all other form factors. It includes passive and active RFID.

The report – ‘Players and Opportunities 2012-2022’ – shows that in many application sectors, RFID orders are up 10 per cent - some much more.

Das said: “Primarily this is due to growth of passive UHF systems for tagging apparel and many closed loop applications. It is also driven by governments doing two things.

“Increasingly, they make it a legal requirement to fit RFID, recent examples being on animals in New Zealand and Europe. Secondly they come up with huge sums of money to buy RFID.

“This varies from local governments committing to non-stop road tolling and library tagging to national governments increasingly buying national ID cards, passports and other forms of RFID. However, we find that military spending on RFID is down from previous highs.

“In retail, RFID is seeing rapid growth for apparel tagging - this application alone demands one billion RFID labels in 2012, with 1.35 billion tags forecast for 2013. RFID in the form of tickets used for transit will demand 500 million tags in 2012.

“In total, 3.98 billion tags will be sold in 2012 versus 2.93 billion in 2011. Most of that growth is from passive UHF RFID labels, however, at that frequency suppliers are still barely profitable so far.

“At the start of 2012, the cumulative number of RFID tags sold over the last 65 years was 15.1 billion: 20 per cent of that number were sold in 2011.

“In many sectors, particularly airline baggage and post, UHF RFID demand has failed to live up to expectations - by a long way. For several years capacity has far exceeded demand and those involved in UHF passive RFID tag manufacture are still not profitable over the term of their investment in the topic.

“This led to a significant amount of consolidation from 2007-2009, particularly of UHF tag manufacture. In contrast, most of the companies involved in passive HF tag supply are profitable. However, from 2011 onwards there has been strong growth in passive UHF tag demand with Impinj, Avery Dennison and others emerging as leaders. Others such as Smartrac have been acquiring companies creating a large RFID business.”

IDTechEx finds that the RFID market will grow steadily over the next decade, rising four-fold in that period to $26.19 billion in 2022.

For more information and sample pages of RFID Forecasts, Players and Opportunities 2012-2022 see www.IDTechEx.com/forecasts

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: IDTechEx CEO, Raghu Das