
Melissa Tan
23 Aug 2010
PTS Technologies is now one of the top five RFID tag suppliers for small livestock in the UK
HOMEGROWN radio frequency identification (RFID tag manufacturer PTS Technologies partly owes its success to earrings. While designing the company's patented livestock tag. Its engineers "spent a lot of time understanding the locking mechanism of various earrings. says PTS chief executive Albert Loh, joking that the company "nearly went into the cosmetic business".
The attention to earrings resulted from a deliberate attempt to develop a tag that needed only one single component instead of two separate pieces, the difference between a hoop ear ring and a stud earring, for instance.
As Mr Loh explains, PTS's tag is 5mm smaller in diameter and "much lighter than its competitors - the result of a six-month design effort.
With that, PTS got its first break in the RFID business-and is now one of the top five RFID tag suppliers by volume for small livestock such as sheep and pigs in the UK.
It has also gone on to sell tags in other countries such as Australia and New Zealand, and is looking to enter the cattle tags market in the US and Canada soon.
Its business is "mainly overseas- the UK, Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand-with only about 10 per cent that's local", Mr Loh says.
RFID will continue to be a revenue driver, he says, possibly overtaking the company's existing OEM business. Its core business was printed circuit board assembly-until a chance to enter the RFID business came along. In 2007, PTS was approached by a Singaporean company to custom develop an RFID tag to trace assets.
"The cost of RFID technology was a bit high at the time but I knew that in years to come this technology would be widely adopted." says MrLoh.
That opportunity was followed by a deal with UK company LTS, which agreed to pay PTS almost $25,000 in commission to develop a low frequency RFID tag for small livestock LTS also introduced PTS to a UK distributor, Symtech.
Mr Loh found out that "most RFID tags are high frequency, but livestock require a certain low frequency due to government regulations", which also stipulates that tags must be readable at distances of 12cm or more. PTS then built a tag that could be read at between 13 and 14 cm.
PTS decided to patent the custom RFID tag and go into the UK market in late 2007, with Symtech's aid.
PTS has received orders for "close to 3 million pieces" and plans to double tag production capacity from 100 a week to 200 in the short run, despite "a worldwide shortage of IC chips, a critical component
PTS has "secured 1.5 million pieces of IC chips" and "in the long term, we're looking at 3,000 to 4,000 a week", says Mr Loh
The company's next step is RFID tags for cattle in the US and Canada. And the cattle tag is almost ready to market.
Mr Loh is also looking at buying a laser machine for about $120,000 to print and program ID numbers on to the company's tags, so each number is easily visible. On other tags, ID numbers are often obscured, he says.
The company plans to focus on RFID for the next 10 years and return to square one, developing RFID technology for security threats, disease control and asset management
"We have had enquiries from a Dubai airport and an Australian school about RFID security tags, and the Middle East too, like Iran, where they rear goats," Mr Loh says, adding that authorities from China have also discussed with PTS the possibility of using its RFID livestock tags there.
"We will go more into asset tracing tags in the future, and photo-voltaic LEDs too, maybe five years down the road," he says
But for now, he aims to "tie up with good distributors, position PTS as a made-in-Singapore brand and tap more of the livestock market.