RFID Market Reaches $7.67 Billion in 2012, Up 17 Percent from 2011

In retail, RFID is seeing rapid growth for apparel tagging—this application alone demands 1 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 vs. 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.