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| Wolf Bielas, partner and CEO at RSI ID Technologies, stands by a microscope at his Chula Vista factory. |
Wolf Bielas and his partners have needed plenty of patience while waiting for the market to warm up to their microchip-studded specialty labels.
Some predicted that 2005 would be the year when radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology took off. It didn’t happen.
Same for 2006. Same result.
The calendar changed to 2007. “We came to the year with low expectations,” said Bielas, sitting in a showroom of RSI ID Technologies in Chula Vista, where he is chief executive.
It turns out that 2007 “has been a decent year,” Bielas said, saying the company reached its September goal in March.
Next year should be much better, he said, with a “hockey stick” turn in the sales graph during the third or fourth quarter.
RFID tags let a person pass a radio scanner over an object, or a pallet of merchandise, and get a signal back, identifying the contents of the pallet.
They are similar to bar codes, though they do not require line-of-sight access between the scanner and label.
The Department of Defense and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. were two of the earliest institutions that called on their suppliers to put RFID tags on merchandise. Since then, Best Buy Co. Inc., Albertsons and Target Corp. have called on suppliers to label their shipments with RFID tags — at least at the pallet level.
Bright Future
“This business is going to be very, very large,” Bielas said, predicting $100 million in sales for RSI by 2011.
Bielas won’t be pinned down on his current sales, saying only they are in the tens of millions of dollars. Such numbers aren’t a part of public record because RSI ID Technologies is private. Bielas has two business partners: Nate Rubin, the company’s chief financial officer, and Enrique Cohen, RSI’s director of Mexican operations.
Still, people love to guess.
