According to ABI Research, container security and tracking revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27% from $212 million in 2011 to $690 million in 2016.

“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,” says ABI’s telematics and navigation group director Dominique Bonte.

“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.