CCL Industries, the Toronto-listed specialty label, security and packaging group, published its third quarter 2026 results on 10 November 2026. The release mentions RFID exactly once. Geoffrey T. Martin, CCL’s President and Chief Executive Officer, said that the company’s Checkpoint division “delivered modest gains for both MAS and ALS operations, including good volume growth in RFID”.
That clause is the whole of it. No revenue figure, no unit volume, no named customer and no growth rate is attached to the RFID business anywhere in the release, and CCL does not report RFID as a separate line.
What Checkpoint actually reported
Checkpoint Systems is CCL’s retail merchandise security and apparel labelling business, and the home of the group’s RFID activity. It runs on two legs. MAS stands for Merchandise Availability Solutions, the electronic article surveillance and loss prevention side that puts hard tags and detection pedestals in shops. ALS is Apparel Labeling Solutions, which supplies the printed and woven labels, care labels and hang tags that go into garments, increasingly with a UHF RAIN RFID inlay built in.
Checkpoint’s sales for the quarter were C$260.0 million, up 1.8% on the third quarter of 2025. Only 0.8 percentage points of that was organic growth, with the remaining 1.0 point coming from favourable currency translation. Operating income was C$39.6 million, up 2.1%, on an operating margin of 15.2%, unchanged year on year.
That made Checkpoint comfortably the slowest of CCL’s four segments. The core CCL label segment grew 14.8% to C$1,446.7 million, Innovia, the group’s speciality films business, grew 25.1% to C$213.5 million, and Avery, its consumer and office products arm, grew 7.3% to C$299.7 million. Group sales rose 12.9% to C$2,219.9 million and operating income 10.7% to C$356.3 million, producing a record adjusted basic C$1.36 per Class B share against C$1.21 a year earlier.
Growing volumes, flat division
The interesting part for anyone selling or specifying RFID is the gap between those two statements. Volumes are described as growing well, while the division they sit inside is close to standing still. Either RFID is still too small a share of a C$260 million quarterly business to move the headline number, or the growth is being offset by softer demand in the surveillance and labelling work around it. The release does not say which, and there is nothing in it that lets a reader tell the two apart.
Context from the rest of the supply chain
Checkpoint’s near standstill is not the whole market picture, but nor is it an outlier among label converters. Impinj, the Seattle supplier of RAIN RFID tag chips and readers, reported third quarter 2026 revenue of $112.1 million on 28 October 2026, up 16.7% from $96.1 million a year earlier, with co-founder and chief executive Chris Diorio saying endpoint IC revenue and unit volumes both set quarterly records. Avery Dennison, the largest supplier of RFID inlays and tags to apparel retail, told the US Securities and Exchange Commission in its quarterly filing of 3 November 2026 that company-wide organic net sales of intelligent labels had increased at a low single digit rate.
Read together, the silicon layer is growing at double digits while the converters stamping that silicon into garment tags are growing at low single digits. Checkpoint sits in the second group. More retail RFID coverage and company results are collected on RFID News.
CCL carried no outlook figures in the release beyond a warning that a destocking correction in European pressure sensitive films was continuing into the fourth quarter of 2026. The company held its results call and webcast at 7:30 a.m. Eastern on 11 November 2026, where any firmer RFID detail would have to come from management commentary rather than the release itself.
Read more at https://www.cclind.com/download/5346/
