Zebra Technologies Profile
Zebra Technologies Corporation operates as a global leader in the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (‘AIDC’) industry.
The AIDC market consists of mobile computing, data capture, radio frequency identification devices (‘RFID’), barcode printing, and other workflow automation products and services. The company’s solutions are proven to help its customers and end-users digitize and automate their workflows to achieve their critical business objectives, including improved productivity and operational efficiency, optimized regulatory compliance, and better customer experiences.
The company designs, manufactures, and sells a broad range of AIDC products, including mobile computers, barcode scanners and imagers, RFID readers, specialty printers for barcode labeling and personal identification, real-time location systems (‘RTLS’), related accessories and supplies, such as labels and other consumables, and related software applications. The company also provides machine vision and robotics automation solutions; a full range of services, including maintenance, technical support, repair, managed and professional services, as well as cloud-based software subscriptions. End-users of the company’s products, solutions and services include those in the retail and e-commerce, manufacturing, transportation and logistics, healthcare, public sector, and other industries. The company operates in 122 facilities worldwide. The company provides its products, solutions and services globally through a direct sales force and extensive network of over 10,000 channel partners, operating in approximately 185 countries.
The company has expanded beyond the traditional AIDC market to transform activities, such as factory production, packages moving through a supply chain, retail shopping, and the hospital patient journey. Data from enterprise assets, including status, condition, location, utilization, and preferences, is analyzed in the cloud to provide prioritized actionable insights. As a result, the company’s solutions enable enterprises to ‘sense, analyze, and act’ more effectively to optimize their activities.
Operations and Technologies
The company’s operations consist of two reportable segments that provide complementary offerings to the company’s customers: Asset Intelligence & Tracking (‘AIT’), which includes barcode and card printing, RFID and RTLS offerings, supplies, and services; and Enterprise Visibility & Mobility (‘EVM’), which includes mobile computing, data capture, fixed industrial scanning and machine vision, services and workflow optimization solutions.
Asset Intelligence & Tracking
Barcode and Card Printing: The company designs, manufactures, and sells printers, which produce high-quality labels, wristbands, tickets, receipts, and plastic cards on demand. The company’s customers use its printers in a wide range of applications, including routing and tracking, patient safety, transaction processing, personal identification, product authentication, ticketing and receipts. These applications require high levels of data accuracy, speed, and reliability.
The company’s printers use thermal printing technology, which creates images by heating certain pixels of an electrical printhead to selectively image a ribbon or heat-sensitive substrate. The company’s printers integrate company-designed mechanisms, electrical systems, and firmware that supports serial, parallel, Ethernet, USB, Bluetooth, or 802.11 wireless communications with appropriate security protocols. Enclosures of metal or high-impact plastic help ensure durability of the company’s printers. Printing instructions can be received as a proprietary language, such as Zebra Programming Language II, as a print driver-provided image, or as user-defined Extensible Markup Language. These features make the company’s printers easy to integrate into most computer systems.
The company also provides dye-sublimination thermal card printers that produce high quality images and are used for secure, reliable personal identification (e.g. state identification cards, drivers’ licenses, and healthcare identification cards), access control (e.g. employee or student building access), and financial transactions (e.g. credit, debit and ATM cards). Additionally, the company provides RFID printers that encode data into passive RFID transponders embedded in a label or card. The company offers a wide range of accessories and options for its printers, including carrying cases, vehicle mounts and battery chargers.
RFID and RTLS Offerings: The company provides a range of hardware and software options for capturing location data to satisfy a large variety of requirements for range, accuracy, and precision. The company’s active and passive RFID products include fixed readers, RFID enabled mobile computers, and RFID sleds that utilize passive ultra-high frequency to provide high-speed, non-line of sight data capture from hundreds or thousands of RFID tags in near real-time. Using the Electronic Product Code (‘EPC’) standard, end-users across multiple industries use the company’s RFID technology to track high-value assets, monitor shipments, and drive increased retail sales through improved inventory accuracy. The company’s location solutions offerings include a range of RTLS and services that generate precise, on-demand information about the physical location and status of high-valued assets, equipment, and people. These solutions incorporate active and passive RFID technologies, beacons, and other tracking technologies to enable users to locate, track, manage, and optimize the utilization of enterprise assets and personnel. The company provides substantially all elements of the location solution, including tags, sensors, exciters, middleware software, and application software.
Supplies: The company produces and sells stock and customized thermal labels, receipts, ribbons, plastic cards, and RFID tags suitable for use with the company’s printers, as well as wristbands for use in laser printers. The company supports its printing products, resellers, and end-users with an extensive line of superior quality, high-performance supplies optimized to a particular end-user’s needs, such as chemical or abrasion resistance, extreme temperature environments, exceptional image quality, or long life. The company promotes the use of supplies with its printing equipment. The company’s supplies business also includes temperature-monitoring labels primarily used in vaccine distribution, which incorporate chemical indicators designed to change color upon exceeding predefined time and/or temperature thresholds.
Services: The company provides a full range of maintenance, technical support, and repair services. The company also provides managed and professional services, including those which help customers manage their devices and related software applications. The company’s offerings include cloud-based subscriptions and multiple service levels. They are typically contracted through multi-year service agreements. The company provides its services directly and through the company’s global network of partners.
Enterprise Visibility & Mobility
Mobile Computing: The company designs, manufactures, and sells rugged and enterprise-grade mobile computing products and accessories in a variety of specialized form factors and designs to meet a wide array of enterprise applications. Purpose-built devices ensure reliable operations for targeted use cases, surviving years of rough handling and harsh environments. Industrial applications include inventory management in warehouses and distribution centers; field mobility applications include field service, post and parcel, and direct store delivery; and retail and customer facing applications include e-commerce, omnichannel, mobile point of sale, inventory look-up, staff collaboration, and analytics. The company’s mobile computing products primarily incorporate the Android operating system and support local-area and wide-area voice and data communications. The company’s products are also offered with software tools and services that enable secure data transmission while also supporting application development, device configuration, and field support to facilitate seamless, rapid deployment and maximum customer return on investment. The company’s products often incorporate barcode scanning, global position system and RFID features, and other sensory capabilities. Additionally, specialized features, such as advanced data capture technologies, data analytics technologies, voice and video collaboration tools, and advanced battery technologies, enable the company’s customers to work more efficiently and better serve their own customers.
Data Capture, Fixed Industrial Scanning, and Machine Vision: The company designs, manufactures, and sells barcode scanners, industrial machine vision cameras, and fixed industrial scanners. The company’s portfolio of scanners includes laser scanning and imager products in a variety of form factors, including fixed, handheld, and embedded original equipment manufacturer (‘OEM’) modules. The company’s scanners incorporate a range of technologies including area imagers, linear imagers, and lasers, as well as read linear and two-dimensional barcodes. They are used in a broad range of applications, ranging from supermarket checkouts to industrial warehouse optimization to patient management in hospitals. The design of these products reflects the diverse needs of these markets, with different ergonomics, multiple communication protocols, and varying levels of ruggedness. In 2021, the company introduced fixed industrial scanning and machine vision solutions. In 2022, the company significantly expanded its machine vision solutions through the acquisition of Matrox Imaging. The company’s fixed industrial scanning products automatically track and trace items that move from production through distribution. The company’s industrial machine vision platform-independent software, software development kits, smart cameras, vision controllers, frame grabbers, input/output cards, and 3D sensors capture, inspect, assess, and record data from industrial vision systems in factory automation, semiconductor inspection, pharmaceutical packaging, food & beverage, among other use cases. The company also provides related software and accessories for these products.
Services: The company provides a full range of maintenance, technical support, and repair services. The company also provides managed and professional services that, among other things, help customers design, test, and deploy the company’s solutions, as well as manage their mobility devices, software applications and workflows. The company’s offerings include cloud-based subscriptions with multiple service levels, which are typically contracted through multi-year service agreements. The company provides its services directly and through its global network of partners.
Workflow Optimization Solutions: The company provides a portfolio of solutions that help its customers improve the agility and productivity of key operational workflows by analyzing and acting on data in real time. The company’s primary focus is on frontline workers in Zebra’s core customer segments, including retail, transportation and logistics, warehouse and distribution, and healthcare. The company’s workflow optimization solutions include:
Software-based solutions, which include workforce management, workflow execution and task management, demand-sensing, price optimization, prescriptive analytics, as well as communication and collaboration-based solutions. These solutions are typically delivered through cloud-based software subscriptions and leverage big data, artificial intelligence, and mobile and web applications to provide customers with real-time visibility and actionable insights about their business. By analyzing labor, inventory, transactional and real-time situational data, these solutions are able to forecast demand, prescribe actions, schedule workers, and enhance collaboration. The company’s software-based solutions are available with multiple service levels, and are often contracted through multi-year service agreements;
Retail solutions, which include a range of physical inventory management solutions, including solutions for full store physical inventories, cycle counts, and analytics; and
Robotic automation solutions, which include software-powered autonomous robots that enable customers to orchestrate workflows alongside frontline workers, improving productivity and operational efficiency. The company’s robotic automation solutions are available in a variety of form factors to accommodate many use cases.
Business Strategies
The key elements of the company’s strategy are to leverage its market leadership position and innovation to profitably grow its core business; advance the company’s enterprise asset intelligence vision; increase its opportunity for growth through expansion in adjacent market segments; and focus on waste reduction, circular economy product innovation with certified refurbished devices, eco-packaging and sustainable product design.
Customers
End-users of the company’s products, solutions and services are diversified across a wide variety of industries. The company has three customers, who are distributors of the company’s products and solutions, that individually accounted for more than 10% of the company’s Net sales 2023.
Sales and Marketing
Sales: The company sells its products and services primarily through distributors (two-tier distribution), value added resellers (‘VARs’), independent software vendors (‘ISVs’), direct marketers, and OEMs; and the company’s software solutions primarily through its direct sales force. The company also sells its products and services directly to a select number of customers through the company’s direct sales force. Distributors purchase the company’s products and sell to VARs, ISVs and others, thereby increasing the distribution of the company’s products globally. VARs, ISVs, OEMs, and systems integrators provide end users with a variety of hardware, accessories, software applications, and services. VARs and ISVs typically customize solutions for specific end-user applications using their industry, systems, and applications expertise. Some OEMs resell Zebra-manufactured products and solutions under their own brands as part of their own product offerings. Because these sales channels provide specific software, configuration, installation, integration, and support services to end-users within various industry segments, these relationships are highly valued and allow the company’s products to reach end users in a wide array of industries around the world. Finally, the company experiences some seasonality in sales, depending upon the geographic region and industry served.
Marketing: The company’s marketing function aligns closely with sales, customer success and product management to market its products and to promote solutions that address the needs of the company’s customers. Marketing is responsible for leading strategic cross-functional practices which benefit the broader organization including pricing, enterprise analytics, customer experience, market sizing, brand strategy and channel strategy. From a more traditional sense, the marketing organization is also consisted of regional marketing teams that interface closely with customers, partners, and sellers; plus teams that support external communications, product marketing, digital marketing, marketing operations, and business intelligence functions.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2023, the company owned approximately 1,800 trademark registrations and trademark applications, and approximately 6,800 patents and patent applications, worldwide.
Research and Development
The company’s research and development expenditures were $519 million for the year ended December 31, 2023.
Competition
Mobile Computing: For some applications, the company competes with companies that provide tablets and smart phones. Competitors include Datalogic, Honeywell, and Panasonic.
Data Capture, Fixed Industrial Scanning, and Machine Vision: Competitors that provide a broad portfolio of barcode scanning products and related services that are suitable for most global market applications include Datalogic and Honeywell. The company also competes against smaller companies that focus on limited product subsets or specific regions, including Newland and Impinj. Competitors in the company’s fixed industrial scanning and machine vision business include Cognex, SICK, and Keyence.
Barcode and Card Printing: Competitors include Fargo Electronics (a unit of HID Global), Honeywell, Sato, Toshiba TEC, TSC, Brother, and Dymo.
RFID and RTLS Offerings: The company competes with numerous companies operating in this market, including Impinj, Chainway, Alien, Rodinbell, JADAK, Ubisense, and Invengo.
History
Zebra Technologies Corporation, a Delaware corporation, was founded in 1969.
