Radio Frequency Identification RFID is a booming business, with much of interest to the printing industry, but not in quite the way that was originally envisaged. About 30 billion cases arrive at major retailers every year and it was thought that most of those cases would be RFID tagged under retailer mandates by now, mainly to reduce stockouts. However, whereas the power of Western retailers meant that such a ruse worked well with anti-theft tags, this time the cost is far higher and there has been much dragging of feet. Even those consumer goods companies that have been mandated are only tagging a few percent of their output and that at a cumulative loss of over $100 million, aggravated by technical problems and over-specification.
That could have led to up to 15 billion tagged prescription drug packages yearly being tagged in the West alone but today only Viagra™, Trizivir™ and a few other drugs are RFID tagged and then only for the US market, it all adding up to only a few million packages yearly.