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Crisis as an opportunity:
The trade fair industry has to reinvent itself because of the Corona crisis
Photo: Julian Stratenschulte / dpa
For the first time in the more than 70-year history of the Hannover Messe, the largest and most important industrial trade fair in the world was canceled last year due to the corona pandemic.
In the meantime, the organizer, Deutsche Messe AG, had around a year to reorganize the industry show.
The result is a purely digital format that tries to counter the disadvantages of the online fair with online presentations, live streams and a new networking tool.
From this Monday on, 1,800 exhibitors, including 600 from Germany and 500 new exhibitors, want to present their products to customers and interested parties.
For comparison: At the last analog Hanover Fair in 2019, around 6,000 exhibitors registered.
Nevertheless, trade fair boss
Jochen Köckler expects
"many tens of thousands of visitors, hopefully 100,000".
Whether this will work will be shown by the last day of the event, next Friday at the latest.
70 percent less sales
The trade fair industry is one of the industries that is suffering particularly badly from the corona pandemic.
Of 360 planned exhibitions last year, more than 70 percent had to be canceled, summarizes
Jörn Holtmeier
, Managing Director of the Association of the German Exhibition Industry AUMA.
Under normal circumstances, the industry's turnover is a good four billion euros per year - in 2020 just one billion euros was generated.
Holtmeier does not expect the economic situation to ease until the second quarter of 2021, when face-to-face fairs can pick up again due to the ongoing vaccination campaign.
Overall, the managing director is again assuming a minus of around 50 percent for this year.
Due to the corona pandemic, trade fairs, congresses and exhibitions are currently only available as digital experiments.
The world's leading trade fair for the international tourism industry, the ITB, also took place digitally in March of this year.
The organizer of the travel fair drew a positive balance: "We are very satisfied, the platform we developed worked and more than 3500 exhibitors from 120 countries were there," summed up
Martin Ecknig
, head of Messe Berlin, to the "Tagesspiegel".
In addition, Ecknig has apparently even succeeded in making money with the digital ITB: According to the report, the exhibitors would have accepted fees of up to five-digit.
IFA was a losing business
Last September, at the first digital radio exhibition, the IFA, the opposite was still the case: For the organizer - also here Messe Berlin - the digital offer was a loss.
There are therefore great hopes for this year's IFA, which, according to the Berlin trade fair boss, can probably take place analogously.
"If anyone can organize a stream of visitors and implement hygiene concepts, then it is the trade fair organizers," said Ecknig, according to the report.
With sensors one can record and control exactly how many people are in which place.
The International Motor Show IAA is also scheduled to take place in Munich again in September.
"In view of the positive developments in the area of corona vaccinations as well as the technical prognoses regarding a significantly flattening infection rate in the summer months, the IAA will take place as a face-to-face event, the Association of the Automotive Industry, which organizes the trade fair, recently announced.
Of course, the success of a digital trade fair also depends heavily on the topic.
For the player community, which usually meets in Cologne for Gamescom, the switch to the online event was a stone's throw away.
Around two million people watched the opening show in front of their screens, 70 percent of them switched on from abroad - the highest internationalization of a German trade fair to date.
However, participation in the player fair was also free.
A mistake if the organizers also want to earn money digitally in the future.
Lower costs
In order to be successful with the online concept, the organizers have to develop completely new formats with opportunities for interaction.
"A concept that only strings together lectures is not enough," said
Klaus Dittrich
, Managing Director of Messe München, of the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". After
all,
no one sits in front of the screen for two days from morning to night and just listens.
The digital concept naturally also has advantages for the organizers: more people can be reached - even across national borders - and the costs are lower because security, cleaning and catering are no longer required.
In addition, the exhibitors can present themselves on this platform all year round and not just at a specific point in time.
The crux of the matter, however, is the still very low sales in digital events, which are still far below those of analog events.
Nevertheless, there is much to suggest that the so-called "hybrid fairs" will prevail at the exhibitions in the future, ie a combination of face-to-face fairs with a large number of digital additions.
Thus, the best of both areas can be combined.
After all, even purely digital trade fairs are not the best solution.
"Many people are tired of seeing the world reduced to 15 inches," believes Deutsche Messe boss Köckler.
The Internet can never replace the experience of personal contact.
In this way, the crisis can also be used as an opportunity to reorganize.
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