An Oasis of Opportunity

While not all of the profit will go to converters, new and undiscovered business opportunities exist for the tag and label industry.

"Item level tagging of retail goods is in the main a long time away, but there are label opportunities in other markets amounting to billions and tens of billions of tags needed per year per application, such as electronic passport inserts, books, drug labeling, healthcare records, postal, etc.," said Raghu Das, CEO, IDTechEx. "This even extends to labels that users would pay $8 for, such as Airbus where they need a large amount of memory and long lasting tags—more expensive substrates and encapsulation. However, this and other [markets] are unsupplied, as few are looking at the full range of diverse RFID markets that need RFID labels."