Container security and tracking revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent from $212m in 2011 to $690m in 2016.

Dominique Bonte, ABI Research telematics and navigation group director, says, "With a lot of regulations and legislation being introduced in the aftermath of 9/11, expectations that this industry would finally take off were high, prompting many vendors to enter this market with advanced solutions. While RFID-based point solutions at port yards are becoming more established - at least in North America and Western Europe - uptake of more advanced GPS-based solutions has been disappointing, despite several solutions having been made available by vendors such as SkyBitz, DB Schenker, Starcom, and Pointer Telocation - mainly for the intermodal market."

At the same time, end-to-end visibility, monitoring, and tracking are becoming more important in an increasingly competitive and security-challenged container transportation industry where cheaper and safer container transport is urgently needed. While this will represent another strong driver for the uptake of GPS-based tracking in the future - though some players still claim tracking of containers during maritime transport on ocean liners is not a major requirement - the coexistence of different technologies such as OCR, RFID, RTLS, and GPS will remain the default situation, with slow migration from legacy systems such as OCR to RFID/RTLS, later followed by a more aggressive uptake of GPS/cellular-based solutions.

ABI Research's new "Cargo Container Security and Tracking" study covers maritime and intermodal asset management solutions that are enabled with a family of integrated wireless technologies to provide real-time, global tracking, security, and communications features. It includes detailed descriptions of segments and verticals, applications and functionality, market drivers and barriers, regulation, and legislation, as well as shipment and revenue forecasts.

Source: ABI Research