Yue’s Yappings

Skyetek, the company I work for, sells RFID reader modules to customers that want to embed RFID readers into their branded products. As a result, if you are shopping for an RFID reader, you’ll never see a Skyetek logo on the outside. Buy you may find the Skyetek logo inside, printed on the circuit boards.

Skyetek mostly focused on the North American market until I joined the company last fall. As we’ve started to do business in Asia, unsurprisingly we’ve found a number of differences.

Here’s just one example - some of my Asian customers have asked if we can provide circuit boards without any logos. Taken aback, I asked them why? The answer is that the RFID market in Asia is so competitive that their competitors will buy their products, take them apart and try to reverse engineer them. Part of the reverse engineering is figuring out who supplies the component parts of the reader. So my customers are trying to protect themselves by trying to conceal who supplies their parts.

And of course branding issues are just one thing out of many. Sometimes small things, like they way packaging slips are done, makes a big difference to my customers. Obviously, we still have a lot to learn about doing business in Asia.