Micro Devices Drive a $38 Billion Opportunity
5/26/17 Do you remember the movie Fantastic Voyage from 1966 where a submarine crew was shrunk to a micro size and drove around inside of a body to repair brain damage? This technology is no longer the topic of Hollywood fantasies. We are using this cutting edge micro technology today! It’s called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). It uses tiny transponders, or tags, to find and track objects. Each micro tag has an antenna that transmits and receives radio waves from an RFID transceiver.
Research and Markets estimates that the global market for RFID and related technologies should reach $38 billion by 2021 from $16.2 billion in 2016, for a compound annual growth rate from 2016 to 2021 of 18.6%.
It has been said that “miniaturized, wireless tracking devices for medicine, retail, manufacturing, and a wide range of other industries are one of the hottest investment trends you can find”.
Doctors use RFID sub-dermal implants in patients to monitor their whereabouts, bio-functions and medical history. Pharmaceutical firms use them to track millions of proprietary drug compounds in their product libraries. Laboratories use them to track tissue or fluid samples.
RFID tags also are used in retail stores, at tollbooths, at gas pumps, on automaker factory floors, and in livestock on farms. As Linda points out:
Technology specialists at Breakthrough Tech Profits emphasize that wireless tracking systems such as RFID represent an exploding, multi-year investing bonanza, especially as they are integrated into the Internet of Things:
“By the end of 2020, the installed base of ‘things’ could top 200 billion worldwide, including some 30 billion installed autonomous things, largely driven by intelligent systems that will be collecting data across both enterprise and consumer applications, according to research firm IDC.
All processor-based systems (think handsets, wearables, GPS devices, RFID tags, automobiles, airplanes, medical devices, HVAC controllers and smart meters) continuously generate machine data, both structured and unstructured.”
The growth stock winners of the future will be the companies offering software platforms that enable organizations to gain operational intelligence by sorting through all of this data. As well as companies that specialize in miniaturization devices.