China has about 150 out of the 1000 RFID suppliers in the world. About 100 of them make RFID tags, increasingly by printing the antennas as UHF versions become more popular and the Hana Label process of printing HF antennas reel to reel directly onto the paper feedstock leads to yet more orders at the ten million level, following the student rail pass. Read the new report HF RFID - The Great Leap Forward.
IDTechEx recently researched the 100 largest RFID hardware manufacturers, finding that 37 percent of them are in China. This is no surprise because 40 percent of the global market for RFID in 2007 was in China. Indeed, in 2007, the second largest number of projects entered into the IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase in the year were from China up from number three the year before and number ten in the year before that. Despite China having a few very large schemes creating most of its market, the Chinese projects still represented 17 percent of the entries in the Knowledgebase in 2007, just behind the leader in projects (not money spent) the USA, as shown below.