Asia Pacific Market for Passive Tags Expected to Triple by 2014

But businesses in Asia Pacific must be wary of restraints that continue to exist within the industry, Sebastian notes, including the overall cost to deploy RFID, long lead times and late delivery of some projects, and the limitations of some operating frequencies. "Designing a proper RFID system is still a challenging task, but end users must also be careful not to overlook performance for price," he says. "There is no point in investing millions of dollars and choosing a cheap tag, because selecting the right inlay can be the difference between success and failure."

RFID is still a relatively new technology in the Asia Pacific region, Sebastian says, adding that the next two to three years will result in an influx of new and emerging applications becoming commercially viable. Sports timing, jewelry tracking, apparel tagging, flower tracking and applications for the oil and gas industry could all become increasingly popular in coming years, he says.

IndianOil Corp., India's largest oil company, has already announced that it will trial RFID tracking of cylinders of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) to prevent theft. All cylinders will be tagged to track their movement from the time they leave a filling station and return for refill, and to identify who delivers and receives them. The pilot will be launched in September or October of this year.

"I believe asset management will be the most popular application in coming years," Sebastian says. "We already see this gaining huge interest among various sectors for one simple reason—all enterprises face tremendous pains when it comes to keeping track of their assets, particularly mobile assets. Considering asset management is applicable across all industries, this will likely be the most popular application down the road."

According to Sebastian, another application expected to prove popular will be document tracking. At present, the cost of tracking all of a company's documents is prohibitive, but the idea, he says, is already gaining traction in industries that require a high level of security and accountability, such as the financial sector and government agencies.

"While some of these projects are still confidential, I can tell that we are already seeing projects being deployed in Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan, just to name a few," he says. "With potentially thousands to millions of documents to keep track of, RFID could see huge growth in this area."