Shanghai Tobacco Group’s Beijing Cigarette Factory has pushed RFID through every stage of its operation, from tobacco leaf sourcing to finished-goods distribution, using 5G-connected UHF handheld readers built by Chinese manufacturer Seuic. The factory reports order processing running 30% faster, inventory counting efficiency improved by 50% and data accuracy of 99.8%.
Seuic, properly Jiangsu Seuic Technology, is a Nanjing-based maker of rugged handheld computers and RFID readers, and published the deployment as a customer case study. Shanghai Tobacco Group is a subsidiary of the state-owned China National Tobacco Corporation and produces the Chunghwa, Double Happiness and Zhongnanhai brands. Its Beijing site is the capital’s only cigarette manufacturer and makes Zhongnanhai, one of China’s leading blend-type cigarettes. The plant came into the group through the 2004 Beijing-Tianjin-Shanghai tobacco reorganisation.
The hardware, named
The deployed device is the Seuic CRUISE2U 5G industrial RFID handheld terminal, listed by Seuic as the CRUISE2 5G Grip Tsled. Inside it is an Impinj E710 reader chip, which places the deployment firmly in RAIN RFID territory: the E710 is a UHF reader chip for EPC Gen2, standardised as ISO/IEC 18000-63. Seuic quotes multi-tag read performance of up to 1,300 tags per second, which is the number that matters for counting cases and pallets rather than scanning single items. The site’s RFID glossary covers the terminology if any of it is unfamiliar.
The terminal has a 6.0-inch display and runs in dual mode, switching between barcode scanning and RFID reading so a single device covers both the existing printed labels and the tagged stock. Connectivity is 5G plus Wi-Fi 6. The housing is rated IP67 for dust and water ingress, and it takes two removable high-capacity batteries, so a device can stay on shift through a battery swap instead of a charging break.
The detail that usually decides deployments like this one is the detachable RFID handle. The pistol grip carrying the UHF antenna comes off, which lets the same fleet of terminals work as slim barcode scanners in areas with no tagged stock, then take the grip back on for bulk RFID counting. One device instead of two is normally the argument that gets the capital approved.
Seuic does not publish the frequency band in megahertz, the tag types in use at the plant, or any headcount or production volume. The E710 settles the technology as UHF, but the specific channel plan is not stated.
From leaf to lorry
The case study describes combined RFID and barcode capture spanning four linked areas: tobacco leaf sourcing, the tobacco stations that handle the raw crop, cigarette production itself, and logistics and distribution out of the factory. The stated problem is the familiar one in a high-volume regulated plant. Manual recording created bottlenecks and left room for human error at every handover between stages.
Reading tags rather than keying numbers is what produces the 99.8% data accuracy Seuic quotes, alongside what it describes as high scan success rates. The 50% gain in inventory counting efficiency is the clearest RFID-specific result, because bulk reading a rack does not need line of sight to each individual label. A stock count that once meant handling every case becomes a walk past it.
The wider picture is that China’s tobacco sector has been one of the country’s heavier RFID users for years, with tagging applied across cultivation, purchasing, production, sales and warehouse logistics, and the supply chain operating under a state traceability regime that gives the read data a compliance job as well as an operational one. What the Beijing deployment adds is the hardware specificity. Vendors in this sector rarely name the terminal, let alone the reader chip inside it.
Read more at https://www.seuic.com/en/cases-energy/shanghai-tobacco-warehouse-digitization.html
