The rise of unmanned retail stores and RFID technology applications

The security industry and RFID technology are inextricably linked. RFID technology plays an important role in the application of products and solutions such as intelligent transportation, smart parking, smart access control, and radio frequency anti-theft. As one of the key technologies of security and Internet of Things, RFID is increasingly rich in related products and system solutions, and the market application is gradually deepening, and the application field is expanding and expanding. The establishment of an unmanned convenience store is self-evident for the enhancement of RFID technology as an important interface for the Internet of Things.

Overall, the main markets for domestic RFID applications are in the areas of identification, traffic management, military and security, asset management, and logistics and warehousing. And in the application of RFID in foreign countries, the absolute main force of retail and transportation logistics. The sum of the two is about 40% of the entire market. Garment applications have been fully deployed in apparel and retail outlets such as Wal-Mart, Metro and Zara.

Due to cost considerations, although many RFID tags are produced domestically, their application in the consumer field is more common in foreign companies. Typical cases such as Decathlon, which use RFID tags in stores worldwide and more than 85% of products. In the domestic consumer sector, in addition to the unmanned retail stores full of gimmicks, some companies in the apparel industry have begun to try to use this technology.

2014年,海曙正式启动研究rch and development of RFID flow reading system, and selected three companies as the label suppliers of Haishu Home RFID flow reading system. Haishu House provides SKU information such as product number, color number, specification, quantity, etc. to selected RFID label suppliers. The RFID label supplier is responsible for writing this information to the chip and sending it to the clothing manufacturer, and then the clothing manufacturer. Attach the tag with the RFID tag to the garment. In 2017, Haicang House held a tender for RFID electronic label suppliers, and the scale of electronic label procurement projects reached 150 million.

In summary, in the consumer field, the current use of RFID tags is limited to logistics and sales, and there are fewer applications in production; large companies and entrepreneurial companies have strong driving force, and small and medium-sized companies and companies with more intermediate links have weaker willingness to promote. .

In the long run, with the decline in the cost of RFID tags, rising labor costs, and the unification of international standards, RFID tags can replace bar codes in more fields. At the same time, it can be expected that the first action must be the leading company in the industry (it takes 3-5 years from the start of testing to the first) and gradually spread to SMEs in the industry.

In terms of related suppliers, in the initial stage, users are more inclined to hire smaller RFID R&D companies for preliminary experiments, but as RFID applications become more widespread, large companies will switch to large, more well-known business technology partners because they Good software and hardware development capabilities have long been available. ABIResearch expects that although AveryDennison, TI, Philips, Zebra, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and other big companies are not RFID as the main business, but will be the biggest winner in the RFID wave, the existing RFID-based Small companies are hard to be their opponents. But because these big companies aren't the best at RFID, they will partner with small companies that specialize in RFID, and even buy and acquire to get higher technology as soon as possible.

In the short term, unmanned retail stores are still hard to become the next explosion point of RFID technology, but it is a new attempt of RFID technology in the field of consumer retail. Of course, RFID technology is just one of the many reasons for the unmanned retail store to attract attention. The value of this new retail form is also the collection of big data for offline consumer spending. Overall, unmanned retail stores are still in the early stages of technological exploration, and it is too early to be truly unattended. The Broken Glass construction of the Bingo Box Experience Store, in the past few days in Shanghai, the general temperature of 35 degrees, the indoor temperature is as high as 40 degrees, only "due to technical debugging, temporarily suspended." Therefore, compared to "unmanned retail stores," RFID chips may be the first to appear in our closets.