RFID Journal Staff asked 9 years ago What advice do you have to offer?
—Name withheld
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You would need to purchase a machine capable of attaching chips to antennas. These are offered by bielomatik jagenberg Inc., Mühlbauer AG, and one or two other companies.
In addition, you would need to buy RFID chips from companies such as NXP Semiconductors or Impinj, and either manufacture your own antennas or purchase them from a third party. If you just want to sell inlays, you could buy polyethylene terephthalate (PET) sheets or another type of substrate on which to mount the transponders. If you just want to sell the transponders, then you would need a way to test the tags coming off the line. And if you want to sell finished labels that can be printed with an RFID label printer-encoder, you'll need to purchase converting equipment.
The equipment involved is pricy. Large-scale manufacturers, such as Avery Dennison, Smartrac, Invengo and others, will have a cost advantage due to economies of scale. Unless you plan to set up an RFID tag manufacturing business in a country where there is a demand for tags (such as where apparel items are made) and where no current facility exists, I would suggest that you think long and hard before entering this business, which is capital-intensive and highly competitive.
—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal
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