Full control of inventories, no wastage, and no shrinkage: that’s Nedap Retail’s mission for every retailer. Nedap Retail develops and markets RFID solutions that help retailers across the globe make their inventories completely transparent, optimise their shop processes, and prevent loss of income. With its iD Cloud platform, the Retail business unit makes it easy for retailers to create perfect inventory visibility, which is a critical success factor in pursuing a successful omnichannel strategy. Alongside the iD Cloud platform, Retail also provides RF-based conventional anti-shoplifting systems.

Nedap Retail targets two retail markets: fashion & sporting goods and essential retail (food and health & beauty). With the iD Cloud Store, the Retail business unit is the global market leader in inventory management solutions based on RFID technology in the fashion & sporting goods market.

Developments in 2022

iD Cloud is the fastest growing platform in the market. Part of that growth came thanks to retailers who were initially using solutions by our competitors but switched to iD Cloud because it offers superior performance and is future-proof. Over the past year, the number of shops using the iD Cloud
platform continued to grow. Among the new customers the Retail business unit secured were several major retail brands, including Hugo Boss, French retailer Promod, and Spanish children’s wear retailer Charanga.

North America is an important growth market for Nedap, which is why further investment went into the sales and execution organisation in this region. In 2022, this resulted in a number of high-profile customers in North America choosing Nedap, including lululemon and Puma.

Carl Barker, Vice President Global Omnichannel, lululemon

In the athletic apparel world, our guests demand versatility as they transition between their fitness routines and daily lives. Guests crave a unified connection between both brick-and-mortar and digital. In order to deliver on this omni guest experience, inventory data needs to be accessible in a split second. With Nedap’s iD Cloud solution, we can leverage real-time, accurate data to enable our in-store educators to spend even more time engaging and connecting with our guests. Having a fully mobile cloud solution in our stores now greatly contributes to that.

Fashion & Sports

In the current economic climate with soaring inflation and great uncertainty, potential new customers in the fashion & sporting goods market were more reluctant to invest than usual. Existing customers, on the other hand, were even more motivated to make the most of the iD Cloud platform. The Retail business unit generated growth by, among other things, providing more solutions to existing customers. In addition, the high retention rate of over 99% was an excellent basis for further growth. The unit owes this high customer retention rate mainly to the excellent support it provides to its customers.

Essential retail market

In the essential retail market, Nedap Retail is mainly successful with its RF-based anti-shoplifting systems. In 2022, revenue and the market share continued to grow. The essential retail market is less affected by the current economic uncertainty.

Product development

The business unit works unceasingly on new solutions and further development of existing solutions. These efforts also extend to extracting insights from data generated from the various iD Cloud solutions. Data from iD Cloud Loss Prevention, for example, provides insight into what kinds of products are theft-prone and at what times such thefts tend to occur. Combining various data streams is, furthermore, a way to detect internal fraud at the checkout at an earlier stage. The Retail business unit has actively shared these effectiever insights with its customers to enable them to better lay out their stores and implement a more effective shrinkage policy.

Aside from that, the unit saw the use of self-scan checkouts increase, as part of an important trend in the retail market. They are tapping into this trend with the new iSenseGo concept they launched in 2022. iSenseGo offers retailers a solution that prevents theft from both traditional and self-scan points of sale, without compromising on the customer experience. This has resulted in several new contracts with major food retailers in Europe.

Work is also going into a new application of this solution that aims to prevent wastage in fashion retail: iD Cloud Sustainability. This solution is intended to give retailers insights that will enable them to better match supply to demand.

Sustainability core team

Nedap Retail has set up a sustainability core team to drive sustainability initiatives and coordinate initiatives put forward by the various teams at the unit. A ‘sustainability champion’ has been appointed on each team to steer implementation of initiatives. In 2022, a ‘Green Wave’ was organised, which produced 25 sustainability initiatives that are now being implemented. In addition, the operations team has developed smarter packaging that makes it possible to load pallets differently, which has increased the amount of hardware that a lorry can ship by 40-100% (depending on the product).

Results and outlook

In 2022, the Retail business unit managed to further grow its market share and revenue. However, component shortages meant that the business unit was unable to meet all demand, which ended up curbing revenue growth somewhat. For 2023, further growth is expected for both the iD Cloud platform and conventional anti-shoplifting systems. Even though Nedap Retail has seen component shortages ease slightly and is reaping the benefits of its efforts to reduce its dependence on scarce components, these shortages will still affect the business.

Sustainable impact

Nedap Retail’s solutions are intended to prevent wastage, among other things. Especially in fashion retail, products that are not sold have a major adverse impact. In the Netherlands alone, an estimated 30% of all new garments go unsold every year, resulting in twelve million tonnes of clothes that are destroyed. The Retail business unit is currently working on an application that tackles this problem: iD Cloud Sustainability. It is intended to give retailers insights that will enable them to better match supply to demand. This way, they will have to procure and produce less, and will have less surplus inventories.