RFID Tags
China’s RFID industry entered a cultivation period as early as 2004, and entered a mature period in 2015. At present, a complete upstream and downstream industrial chain has been formed. It is in the golden age of the industry’s upward development. The sudden outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020 will undoubtedly have a direct impact on the growth of the RFID industry in its golden age. As of today, what is the development trend of RFID tags smart labels entering the post-epidemic era?
Lack of Chips
From the end of 2020 until today, the “lack of chip” problem is the most trouble in the RFID industry. It is understood that for manufacturers upstream of the RFID chip and module supply chain, as long as they receive a call in the near future, it is mostly a problem that customers urge delivery. But at the moment, there is really no way to give customers a satisfactory answer. This also allows customers to implement some projects. Because of the lack of chip protection, many factories chose to postpone the projects.
For the RFID industry, in addition to the reasons mentioned above, there are also influences from the internal conduction of the semiconductor industry. Because of the “lack of chip” is a common problem faced by all walks of life. In the case of foundry production capacity is tight, the production of RFID chips will also suffer from a run on the production schedule of chips such as automobiles and consumer electronics. Naturally, production capacity is even more tight.
The demand for chips has skyrocketed
From the demand side, it is a different picture. Under the influence of the new crown epidemic, the home economy has accelerated the global digital transformation. Various demands carried by cloud services have seen large-scale growth. Further opened up the market demand for RFID smart tags. In addition, with the help of 5G applications, the volume of information circulating around the world has increased significantly. And behind these growths, they need more IC and memory entities as support. Because of this, in the case of tight chip supply, in order to ensure the normal operation of the company, companies led by large manufacturers have started a chip “hoarding” model. This led the entire industry to “stock up”. Once again magnified the panic in the market.
As one of the industries with the strongest global collaboration effect, the semiconductor industry chain is too complicated. In addition, the external environment is full of variables, and there are too many uncertainties that are unpredictable. In addition, due to the short development history of the domestic semiconductor industry. With a strong external dependence, the chip supply chain has a very serious risk of “broken chain”. Therefore, we have to maintain a high degree of vigilance.
Come to a conclusion
At the end of 2020, the author had in-depth exchanges with several veterans in the RFID industry on the issue of “shortage of cores”. At that time, the RFID industry was not greatly affected by the shortage of chips. optimism. Nowadays, everyone basically thinks that the shortage of chips will not only happen in the next few months or half a year, but it is likely to last for about a year or even longer. Not long ago, TSMC CEO Wei Zhejia also publicly stated in the media that the global chip shortage may continue until 2022.
