CeBIT exhibitors dropping out

Lenovo, the Chinese company which bought IBM's notebook computer division, just announced they won't be exhibiting at the next CeBIT show in March, 2007.

Other big names which won't be attending include Motorola, Nokia, and BenQ, though the latter is no surprise. Neither Dell nor HP have been showing there for a few years and Philips, Sony and E-Plus weren't there this year.

Attendance has been dropping steadily for the past five years, from 850,000 attendees in 2001 to anywhere from 200,000 to 450,000 this year, depending on whose numbers you accept.

The Systems trade fair here in Munich has been running steadily for years. This may be due to the fact that Systems is aimed squarely at industry people rather than trying to be something for everyone, something which brought CeBIT much attention in the earlier years but which is now hurting them since the displaying companies have trouble reaching their target markets. The general public isn't terribly welcome at the show going on this week at Messe Munich.

"CeBIT" stands for Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik (Centre for office and information technology). It was established as a sole technology and telecomms trade fair in 1986.

woof.

It's probably become a victim of its own success. I haven't been for a few years, mostly because there are (were) just too many people there. It became a pain in the ass just to get there and move around. And when you did manage to get near a (pre-)sales person, it was a pain to get any time for a chat. It really only worked if you'd made a pre-arrangement or knew them already... which kind of defeats the purpose.

I agree. I worked a stall in 2005 in the media section. We found it to be too many kids. All the free stuff where should be giving to clients about the company where taken by the kids. For companies that want to meet other companies (which is the point) they end up missing the right people to talk to.

I like kids.

But they killed my CeBit!

For this reason Cebit will prob. raise the ticket price again, to discourge kids from going, perhaps even get rid of the "Cheap weekend" ticket too.

Oh, now I know why I could get 10 tickets for free that easily.

Anyone's been to CEBIT in the previous years? How was it?

In my opinion CeBit is just too big and as BD says; it tries to be everything to everyone and somehow now manages to fail.
I used to frequent CeBit as an exhibitor with the company I used to work for and my only recommendation is to work out in advance exactly what you wish to see and spend most of your time specialising in that area.
If you go along expecting to see everything in a day or even two, then forget it. You'll end up not really seeing anything.
MT

wow...
Sounds just like IFA
total crap
[img]http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m252/RiverIsMyGoddess/icons/th_smiley_running.gif[/img]

Not even close to IFA. MANY times larger. If you were to walk all the CeBIT aisles you would walk over 30km. Hannover is flooded out at CeBIT time. If you don't book early (3 months before) you won't get a room for 100km. Some people commute from Hamburg. There are so many cars driving into the show each morning they turn the inbound lane of the Autobahn around so that all 8 lanes feed the show (and do the opposite in the evening). One Hall has permanent stands, owned by the exhibitors and is only open for CeBIT. Always good for a walk around to see the sights, the shows and many new ideas, but not really a show for a serious business visitor to investigate, research and meet. It became very much an "image" thing in the 80's an 90's - if your business was not at CeBIT then you must be going down the tubes. Since then a lot of the larger players actually started pulling out because of the expense and lack of recognisable benefits, others have joined them. There were only 430,000 visitors to 6,200 exhibitors last year. Far from the heady 90's when over 700,000 visitors met over 8,000 exhibitors.

I think it is just a general trend as far as trade fairs go. People are now going for online exhibitions and I think that people or companies are just not finding the time to go and visit. I was at the Learntec in Karlsruhe a few weeks ago and ok it is a much smaller scale that the CeBit but nevertheless it was a lot smaller and than the year before and the year before that.

Things are changing and in busy lives people are just visiting online exhibitions instead it is a much more efficient way of getting at the information you need.

I think I can safely say that every exhibition I have been to I ever really came back with anything that I couldn't have got online or via a few phonecalls. Yes it is nice to see what new products are out there and look at demos but I can also do this from the comfort of my own office without having to pay 6€ for a dry sandwich for my lunch and coming home with aching feet after standing in heels all day

I had the impression (after talking with a colleague) that it is more for serious business than "look around" visitors. My boss has booked some demo tours but knowing him, he's going there to showoff his namecard


I want to see the new technological gadgets kinda of stuff rather than what SAP solution will be coming up. Is CEBIT not for me then? (Thinking twice now)