Interview: Abby Wu on why European and Asian RFID are closer than you think

Europe assumes it is behind Asia on RFID. Abby Wu, who works in global business development at one of the world’s largest inlay makers and sits on the RAIN Alliance board, says the opposite: European retailers adopted it earlier, and what separates the two regions is not ambition but the density of the supply chain. On scale, price, regulation, and the question buyers never ask a tag supplier.

Xindeco IoT makes more than three and a half billion tags a year and has said publicly it wants to reach ten billion within five years. Most people in our industry have never stood in front of an inlay line. What does that scale actually require, and what had to change in the factory to go from millions of tags a year to billions?

A clarification first, because it matters: three and a half billion tags a year is the capacity we operate across two production sites, around 2.5 billion in China and 1 billion in Malaysia, rather than 3.5 billion in Xiamen alone, and every capacity figure I mention here is a combined figure for both sites.

Ten billion is still the direction we are working towards, and like the 3.5 billion today it is a figure for both sites together, not a target for one of them. The capacity is planned in line with the company’s strategic direction and with how the market actually moves, not against a fixed calendar. Planning for both sites is adjusted dynamically as the market and our international business develop, so the balance between them can shift with it. The direction of 10 billion is unchanged.

What is concrete is the next physical step. In 2027 we relocate into a new industrial park in Xiamen, and additional capacity there is already under evaluation. The new site is considerably more intelligent than the one it replaces: more automation, more in-line sensing, more of the decision-making moved from the operator into the process.

We now operate as one closed loop, and that is where a large part of our investment goes. Going from 3.5 billion towards ten billion, what we have kept investing in is one thing: consistency and stability. The same tag behaving the same way, at any volume, and from whichever site it comes. Incoming material and in-process parameters are controlled at IQC and IPQC, so a deviation is caught before it reaches the line. RF performance is verified tag by tag, against a stable reference, on Voyantic. Automated optical inspection watches the key quality features in line and in real time. Every inlay carries its own digital record, a DIP that ties material, process, inlay and TID data together from initial binding through to final packaging, with OQC packing data closing the chain.

In practice that gives us 100 per cent read testing instead of sampling, closed-loop control of each inlay, and roll-level traceability back to the machine, the shift and the wafer lot. Underneath all of it sits an operating culture that had to change at the same time: from batch thinking to continuous operation, with multiple shifts, OEE targets and statistical process control, and on the incoming side where the consistency of chip-on-tape, antenna and adhesive matters more than unit price. The digital chain and the operating discipline together are what allow a tag produced on a second site to behave identically to one from the first. All of it has to be true in a new plant on day one, not eventually.

“All of it has to be true in a new plant on day one, not eventually.”

Your session in Madrid is the Asian Market Outlook. From where you sit, what is already ordinary in Asia that a European retailer would still consider ambitious?

On the application side, I do not think there is much difference between Europe and China. If anything, I would say European retail brands adopted RFID earlier than most Asian brands, in both the scale they have reached and the pace at which they got there. So if the question is what is ordinary in Asia that a European retailer would find ambitious, my honest answer is that in the applications themselves, the gap is smaller than people assume.

What is different, and where I think a European audience would find it striking, is the manufacturing ecosystem. In our region a new inlay design can move from drawing to volume production in weeks, because antennas, adhesives, liner, converting equipment, tooling and automation builders are all within a short radius. Europe has its own tag factories, so this is not about capability. It is about the density of the supply chain around the factory, and what that density does to cycle time. That is the part I would put in front of a European audience.

So the difference is not ambition, and it is not whether the technology works. It is the breadth of the applications and the volume behind them: fresh food moving through cold chains, express parcels, hospital instruments and linen. Those put obligations on the data that retail alone does not, and in Asia they are already running at scale rather than in pilot. That is where most of the volume growth is, and it is why, in much of Asia, the question is rarely “should we tag this?” It is “why is this not tagged yet?”

That is also the story I will tell in Madrid. The session has three parts: what is happening in Asia, what China did to make it happen, and what it looks like once the technology is deployed at scale.

The framing is deliberately simple. For twenty years this industry built the plumbing, the standards, the chips, the tags, the readers, and the question was whether it worked. That question is settled. The question now is what value it unlocks, and how you measure it: inventory accuracy, cash released from working capital, and what it does for the people on the shop floor. Asia is the right place to look, because three things arrive there at the same time: the supply base, the demand, and the deployment scenarios.

The one point I want to make is this: Chinese end users still account for less than nine per cent of global tag usage, even though China is where much of the world’s tags, readers and silicon are made. That gap is the opportunity, and it is bigger than most European audiences expect.

Xindeco IoT serves apparel, retail, food, 3C, logistics, medical and personal care. In Europe, apparel dominates and most other sectors are somehow behind. Is the mix different across Asia, and which sector has grown faster than you expected?

Honestly, the differences in application are smaller than people expect. Apparel and footwear retail is the largest segment of the global RAIN market, and that is as true in Asia as it is in Europe. Where Asia is broader is in the sectors sitting behind it. In China there are substantial volumes in grocery and fresh food, in logistics and express, in 3C and electronics, and increasingly in medical and personal care. Those sectors are growing in Europe as well.

The sector that surprised me is food. Five years ago I would have called it a long-term story, and today it is one of the fastest-growing segments, particularly box- and pallet-level tracking through cold chains, and item-level tagging on high-value fresh categories.

But if you want the one thing that is genuinely different, it is not the application. It is the pace. Most brands roll RFID out gradually: a pilot, then a region, then more stores over several years. Some of the Chinese brands we serve have gone live across their entire estate within a single season. That is a different kind of test. It puts enormous pressure on speed, on efficiency, on control of the overall project schedule, and on quality consistency, because there is no gradual learning curve and the whole volume lands at once. That is the way those programmes have been delivered, and it changes what a supplier has to be good at.

“Some of the Chinese brands we serve have gone live across their entire estate within a single season. There is no gradual learning curve and the whole volume lands at once.”

Tag price is the first question almost every buyer asks. Over your fifteen years in this industry, what has actually driven the cost down? And is there more to come, or are we approaching the floor?

Price has come down over the past fifteen years, and I would describe that as the result of orderly competition: smaller die areas, better wafer yield, faster lines, tighter registration, less material waste per tag, and one shared standard that lets buyers multi-source. Those are healthy developments, and one consequence is that the technology is now affordable enough to place on lower-value items, which is where much of the volume growth comes from.

Price is not what we spend our time discussing with customers, though, and that is not us being evasive. Over fifteen years we have reached a shared understanding with them, and it comes down to one line: value has to exceed the price. Price is always on the agenda, of course. But what actually decides whether a programme delivers is the quality and stability of the whole RAIN ecosystem: the chip, the inlay, the encoding, the reads, the data, and how all of it behaves over ten years of operation. Get that wrong and the unit price stops mattering. Get it right and the price is simply what a system that works costs.

What customers need from a supplier, and what has to hold steady regardless of what happens to price, is innovation, stability and consistency. The roadmap moves every year: new chip generations, new inlay form factors, new materials, new data requirements. A supplier that stops innovating does not fail loudly; it becomes irrelevant quietly. Stability matters because these are ten-year deployments, where encoding, read performance and interoperability have to behave in year seven exactly as they did in year one. And consistency is the least glamorous and most important of the three: the same tag, from the same source, performing identically in every batch, at every site, in every country.

That is also why the number worth arguing about is not price per tag but the value delivered per accurately read item, across the working life of the tag. In a large deployment, most of the remaining loss is not in the inlay at all. It is in the failures, the exceptions and the manual work that a tag which does not read creates. That is where the next few years of improvement will come from.

“A supplier that stops innovating does not fail loudly. It becomes irrelevant quietly.”

The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation and the Digital Product Passport are changing what a tag has to be, not only what it costs: materials, recyclability, and data carried at item level. What are your European customers asking you for now that they were not asking two years ago?

Regulation has moved from a technical footnote to the first slide of the conversation. PPWR and the Digital Product Passport are the two that shape what a tag has to be: materials and recyclability on one side, and a unique item identity with data that stays meaningful for years on the other.

In practice, an RFID tag is now assessed on three things at once: what it is made of, what it carries, and whether it survives contact with a recycling stream. That is why converters are being asked for recycled or certified facestock, adhesives that do not interfere with paper recycling, material declarations, and evidence that a tag can be detected and removed at scale rather than ending up as contamination. It has also put interoperability at the centre of the discussion: none of it works if the data cannot be read across systems.

What has changed most this year is the speed of it. PPWR has moved quickly down through the chain to every supplier, and the practical work is now about being aligned before the requirement lands rather than after. Xindeco IoT and our supply chain partners completed that alignment early, so we are positioned to support customers’ requirements as they come through.

You have spent fifteen years at one company and now sit on the RAIN Alliance board. For a European business choosing a tag supplier for the first time, what is the question they ought to ask that they usually do not?

The questions that decide these projects are about what happens after the purchase order, not at it.

The first is: will you still be the same supplier in ten years? These are deployments that run for a decade, and switching a tag programme is expensive. So the fair question is not only what a supplier can do this quarter, but whether they own their own manufacturing, whether they run more than one site, whether they are still investing in the roadmap, and whether the people who set up the project will still be there. Longevity is a feature, and it is rarely on the checklist.

The second is compliance. European customers increasingly want a supplier who can demonstrate it rather than promise it: declarations, material statements, regulatory conformity, and the ability to answer a regulatory question years after the tag was made. That is a capability, and it has to be built well before it is needed.

Beyond those two, what European customers are actually testing is durability: whether the supplier is sustainable as a business and in how it makes things, and whether it takes the long view rather than the current quarter. That takes years to prove and cannot be answered by a datasheet, but it is usually what decides whether a relationship lasts a decade.

And one quieter question: ask who actually converts the inlay. In this industry, not everyone selling tags is manufacturing them.

One personal observation, if I may. In fifteen years here, what we have built with European customers is not only a business relationship. In most cases it has become a partnership. We try to see the problem before they have to spell it out, solve it with them, and take some of the worry off their side of the table. That is the philosophy of the company, and it is a simple one: take the long view, and stay with it. Long-termism is not a slogan for us, it is the only way we have ever grown.

“Ask who actually converts the inlay. In this industry, not everyone selling tags is manufacturing them.”

The RAIN Alliance featured you in its “Be the Spark” series on women building technology. What would you say to a young female engineer in Asia, or indeed globally, looking at this industry now?

First: say yes to the challenge before you feel ready. When I was asked to be involved in building our factory in Malaysia, I had never built a factory. Courage and curiosity carried me much further than confidence did.

Second: stay focused and stay professional, and keep learning, even when the subject sits far outside your comfort zone. I went from a bachelor’s degree in literature to a master’s in science, which is a large jump across disciplines, and it taught me the same lesson: the distance matters less than the willingness to start.

Third: be honest about what you do not yet know, and do not be afraid of it. You will not be perfect, nobody is, and that is not the point. What you can choose is not to be quieter. Treat it as a reason to contribute earlier and more often, and do not set limits on what you are willing to take on. That is true at work, and it is true in life. When I joined the RAIN Alliance board as its first Asian woman director, I did not feel a ceiling being removed. I felt a seat that had been empty for far too long.

“I did not feel a ceiling being removed. I felt a seat that had been empty for far too long.”