RFID Invest, a Liechtenstein holding company that owns Identec Solutions, as well as a handful of other RFID firms, has adopted a new business strategy and has changed its name to Identec Group. The restructured entity combines nine businesses to provide full RFID solutions within a variety of markets, including hospitality and oil and gas. The result, the company reports, makes Identec Group possibly the largest full-solution RFID firm worldwide, in terms of the number of customers, solutions, industries and markets served. The company sees itself poised to grow larger as it seeks to acquire additional RFID technology companies around the globe.
Over the past five years, RFID Invest has acquired Identec Solutions, a provider of active RFID tags and readers, with headquarters in the United States and a corporate office in Dornbirn, Austria; InSync Software, a U.S. developer of solution templates enabling users to build and deploy RFID- and sensor-driven track-and-trace and asset-management applications; Beverage Metrics, a U.S. company that markets an RFID-based solution that restaurants and caterers can utilize to track inventory, as well as their usage of liquor, wine and beer (see Beverage Metrics Serves Up Drink-Management Solution); Hothead Technologies, a U.S. developer of wireless sensors for monitoring the temperatures of athletes, workers and other personnel (see Georgia High School Football Teams Put RFID Into Play); ER Systems, a Swiss provider of RFID-based health-care and security applications; Gantner Electronic, a multinational access-control and cashless-payment solutions provider, headquartered in Austria; Trafficpass Holding, an Austrian provider of wireless payment solution for parking lots; French anti-theft retail technology firm Digiprice; and RFID-enabled air-cargo system provider Cargobox Holding, based in the Netherlands. Each member company will continue to market its products under its own brand name, though all of these firms will also identify themselves as members of Identec Group.
Altogether, Identec Group now serves more than 2,000 customers in 16 industries on six continents, with offices in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, India, Australia and the United States. The firm will have considerable presence in the United States, says Martin Zumtobel, Identec Group’s chairman, since four of its nine companies are based in that country: InSync Software, Hothead Technologies, Beverage Metrics and Identec Solutions. One focus, says Dietmar J. Amann, Identec Group’s CEO, is on connecting end users via the cloud (the Internet) with information stored on remote computers.
Zumtobel and Amann co-founded RFID Invest in June 2005. Since then, Zumtobel says their strategy has focused on gaining 100 percent ownership of all its companies. Currently, Identec Group owns 100 percent of InSync Software, Beverage Metrics and Gantner Electronic, and is in final negotiations to acquire 100 percent of Hothead Technologies. The company owns 71 percent of Identec Solutions, 70 percent of ER Systems, 28 percent of Trafficpass Holding, 25 percent of Cargobox Holding and 12 percent of Digiprice. “I want to continue our 100 percent ownership strategy and make the company the leading global solutions provider.” He expects the firm will go public, he adds, once it has “reached the stage where it makes sense to go to the capital markets to fund our continued growth.”
Zumtobel, an Austrian entrepreneur, has headed investment firm F.M. Zumtobel, and in 1975 launched the Familia supermarket chain, which he has since sold. Amann, also from Austria, was a private equity manager who, in the late 1990s, helped to establish media and Internet investment group Beisheim Holding Schweiz, where he headed its Strategic and International Business Development Division.
Amann says his interest in radio frequency identification began when he and Zumtobel started looking into the technology in 2004. “After surveying the RFID industry,” he states, “we came to the conclusion that it was a major growth opportunity about to happen. Perhaps we were a little early in our assumption, but we have been quietly building our group over the past six years, and now it is beginning to realize its potential, along with the RFID industry.”
The company’s new strategy has three key components, Amann says. The first is identifying more potential acquisitions. Good candidates, he indicates, would be companies with customer-centric RFID solutions in vertical growth markets, as well as solid management and compatible business strategies. “We have a distribution network worldwide,” he says, noting that there are “lot of companies that are regional, but want to be all over the world.”
The second strategy, Amann adds, is to introduce the necessary capital, as well as operational and strategic support, to help its member companies grow. And the third is to implement technology, marketing, administrative and customer-sharing synergies across those businesses.
As part of the third strategy, marketing their own solutions, four of Identec Group’s member companies—Identec Solutions, InSync Software, Beverage Metrics and Hothead Technologies—showcased their inter-relationships at RFID Journal LIVE! 2011, held last week in Orlando, Fla. At the conference, Beverage Metrics and Hothead Technologies demonstrated their products, which employ software from InSync and hardware from Identec Solutions. Hothead Technologies and Beverage Metrics, for their part, provide InSync and Identec Solutions with access to specific vertical markets. That, Zumtobel says, is the best example of cross-fertilization.
The push to grow the company’s full-solution capabilities come as the RFID industry is showing signs of undergoing further growth in the near future. “The market seems to be moving to embrace RFID, particularly active RFID,” Amann says. “We’ve come through a tough [economic] time in the industry. Now is the time that people are ready to embrace some of these solutions, and we are able to provide them better than anyone else before us.”