Editor's note: We are pleased to provide the following "on-the-ground" report from guest blogger Atul Salgaonkar, Founder of RFID Solutions. He blogs about a speaker at a recent conference who provides insights about China's approach to RFID:

It is interesting how 90% of articles about Wal-Mart and RFID don't mention China, while in the stores, 90% of items are from China.



In this context, the remarks by a speaker at a recent conference about China's approach, philosophy and status related to RFID are very important.

The speaker was Oliver Wang who was visiting from SAP Labs in China.



Main takeaways from his talk:

China's government at its highest levels, the Standardization Administration of China (SAC) , has realized the importance of RFID. Within the SAC, there are several hundred Technology Committees set up.

Any company can join the Working Group of a committee but has to pay the designated fees.

Currently, for passive RFID, the only assigned frequency that has been legally authorized in China is 13.56 MHz. Consequently, the large number of tags that are being made and used locally by Chinese manufacturers are at 13.56MHz.

In a recent SAP Labs survey, they found that their Chinese customers report the top two priorities of RFID deployment as (1) inventory visibility, and (2) control of work-in-process for Warehouse/Material/Supply Chain management

The Chinese government is working on approving the use of UHF band 860-930 MHz frequency spot for RFID tags and is expected to be in line with pre-established international standards. The EPC related numbering scheme will get defined by the Article Numbering Center of China (ANCC). For more, go to www.npc.org.cn.

Coming back to Wal-Mart, the suppliers expect to get RFID tags made in the US shipped to China where these will get applied at pallet/case level before merchandise gets transported to the US-based Wal-Marts.