Issue #0610/2 - Visitor numbers reducing, not much new and exciting to see, less expensive alternative – all adds up to a tough time for CeBIT.
Reports from CeBIT, based in Hanover, Germany, indicate that the attraction of the world’s largest international technology fair may have seen its day. Visitor numbers have been shrinking steadily over the past five years.
Although CeBIT has been running for 20 years and has long been the major technology attraction in Europe, it was probably partly responsible for the demise of smaller national exhibitions around Europe.
At the time big was attractive, it meant that visitors could see everything, make their business decisions and place their orders in just one visit – even if that one visit did require several days.
Over the last decade however, CeBIT has become too bog for its own good. Too many product areas are battling for visitor attention and it is expecting to cover too wide a geography. CeBIT has become unmanageable to the IT buying professional and, this year, there has been little of real newsworthiness at the show.
In addition, visitors have to stay for a week to see everything they need to see. At €38 for a day ticket, plus hotel costs and travel costs, not to mention a week out of the office, the whole CeBIT experience seems to have waned.
Many visitors attend CeBIT under duress and would prefer not to be there. Many individuals on exhibitor’s stands are there under duress and would prefer not to be there.
With another major exhibition, IFA, also taking place in Germany, now on an annual basis having been every two years, CeBIT has increasing competition that looks to be the more attractive proposition to visitors.
IFA is also an international exhibition, covering consumer electronics, which attracted around 250,000 visitors last year. While this figure is more than half the CeBIT visitor numbers, the exhibition has only about one-third of the number of exhibitors from around half the number of countries that CeBIT draws on. The suggestion is that visitors find this more manageable than CeBIT, particularly with entrance prices being at one-third the level of ticket prices for CeBIT.
Berlin, rather than Hanover, might be proving an attraction also.
One final indicator that the day of the mega-exhibition may be numbered is the fact that virtual visits to CeBIT increased significantly this year. For those who need the information but do not need to see and feel the products, or talk to the specialists and salesmen, a virtual visit is far more cost and time-effective and does not disrupt the ongoing business flow.
Perhaps CeBIT is going the way of Comdex in the US, which was axed in 2004. If this is the case, IFA needs to be careful not to simply take the place of CeBIT and grow to be unmanageable itself.
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