Handheld Terminals Market opportunities
The retail industry has undergone major changes over the last decade. Facing increased competition, retailers are under constant pressure to differentiate themselves by providing personalised and responsive customer service and deploying technology that enables real-time communication and inventory management. Handheld terminals play a significant role in ensuring this differentiation by introducing mobility and real-time ability into the retail enterprise.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan finds that the market earned a total revenue of over $4.5 billion in 2007.
”Handheld terminals have played a significant role in introducing mobility and real time ability into the retail enterprise,” notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Prasanna Prakash.
“They have enabled retailers to focus more valuable time on their customers, thereby boosting in-store productivity and efficiency as well as customer satisfaction. They also aid in a wide range of functions such as inventory and promotions management, competitive pricing, cross selling, up selling, and better networking of stores across the world.”
An increasing number of retailers are altering their business models to provide an innovative experience to their customers and improve their bottom line growth. They also focus on forming strategic partnerships with solution providers to offer unique customer experiences.
Advanced wireless networks combined with handhelds allow store associates to manage the store from any location, thereby providing greater ease and reduced stock-outs. This multifunctional aspect of handhelds has resulted in its increasing demand across the world.
However, increased competition as a result of industry consolidation, flexibility in usage, continued downward pressure on prices and margins, security issues, and application stability are some of the challenges that vendors need to overcome in order to improve their bottom line growth.
“Furthermore, technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) have not had the expected success in the retail sector,” says Prakash. “In addition to its high costs of deployment, there is still a lot of instability involved in the technology.”
Technology vendors in the POS, handheld terminals, and tablet PC space focus on providing multifunctional device architectures capable of forward and backward integration into the retail value chain starting from the warehouse to the customer.
Strategic partnership between technology vendors and retailers is key to address operational and profitability challenges and adapt to changing customer demands. Technology vendors should also focus their sales efforts on small and medium enterprises, which is a largely untapped market.
Loading ...