As ABI Research forecast in its earlier research, the growth of electronic container tracking has been sluggish so far, mainly due to a lack of government mandates and standards. However, industry acceptance of and interest in RFID for container tracking has grown in the past year and some new programmes are already underway.

     It''s not all bad news. In addition to new container tracking programmes, such as C-TPAT Plus, ABI predicts that key market events will spur growth from now on. Last month, Hutchison

       Port Holdings and Savi Technology announced a partnership to further the installation of active RFID checkpoints throughout the world.     

     These joint ventures are fruitful for both parties as Savi now has access to install its infrastructure at the ports and Hutchison is able to offer a new value-add to its customers. 116.30.151.81 This article is copyright 2005

UsingRFID.com.

Partnerships work
"Partnerships between the IT firms and ports are the stepping stones to widespread adoption," said ABI Research analyst David Schrier.

  "Even in the absence of government mandates, if the network is deployed at a vigorous pace, we will begin to see high volumes of electronic container tracking by the end of this decade."

     Electronic container tracking growth depends not only on mandates, standards, joint ventures and network deployment, but also on smoothing out any lingering technical issues.

     Among the remaining technical challenges are achieving high read rates in the port environment, and routing appropriate cargo information to the customer.

Tomorrow''s leaders
     "Firms that can efficiently and securely transmit cargo information to the end-user are well positioned in the container tracking market," added Schrier. "Streamlining accurate shipping information into enterprise systems adds tremendous business value."

     The ABI Research study, ''Container Security and Tracking'', examines evolving solutions and technologies for global electronic container tracking, including RFID, GPS, cellular, satellite, Ultrawideband, Bluetooth, barcode, and optical character recognition.

 

 

 

 

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