AIDC Technology

According to Venture Development Corporation (VDC) , a market research company based in Massachusetts, USA, market for handheld bar code scanners alone in Americas was $522 million in 1999 and it was growing at over 10% rate at that time. In unit numbers, there were 2.4888 million units sold. This number represents hardware only and does not include Europe.

According to Frost &Sullivan data quoted by AIM (industry organization for AIDC), market size for AIDC products was $2.369 billion in 1996 and approximately 4.548 billion in 2000. This report was published before 2000 and year 2000 numbers were forecasts at that time. Individual breakdown in Frost & Sullivan report were as follows:

Our definition of AIDC market is broader than that of either VDC or Frost & Sullivan reports. We see significant trends that will spur major AIDC vendors to play a significant role in mobile commerce market and in supply chain automation.  Therefore, we also include mobile-commerce related AIDC market, systems integration and related services.  Therefore based on this expanded definition of AIDC, MobileInfo.com’s estimates the world-wide market to be around 10 billion dollars now.  In future, our unscientific insight tells us that this number will be much greater. If we hazard a guess (with appropriate disclaimers), it would be at least in $20 billion dollars in 2005.  According to a recent press report, one retailer itself plans to install billion plus RFID chips in its inventory and integrate this information in its supply chain application by 2005.