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Happy days again for exhibitors

By Zhou Yan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-12 08:20

China's exhibition industry, which was affected by the economic downturn in the beginning of the year, has picked up steam in the latter half of the year with the domestic economy showing signs of recovery.

"We have seen more exhibitors returning to our trade fair since June, and our 4,900 booths for the October exhibition have been fully booked," said Jiang Chengwen, managing director of Reed Huabo Exhibitions (Shenzhen) Co, the nation's largest gift event organizer in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.

The firm reduced the number of booths to 3,900 in its April exhibition as some small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) stayed away from the fair in a bid to cut costs.

The industry has seen up to 40 percent decline in both the scale of exhibitions and the volume of participants in the first six months of the year from a year earlier, according to Jiang.

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As an economic barometer, the exhibition sector was severely hit by the financial crisis, said Wang Gang, secretary general of the International Exhibition Industry Alliance (IEIA), a non-profit organization founded by e-commerce tycoon Alibaba Inc in January 2008.

The unofficial organization sponsored a Davos-style summit, known as "2009 Member Conference of IEIA and IEIA Industrial Economy Summit" that opens today in the capital city of Zhejiang province. The fair intends to facilitate trade channels for both exhibitors and SMEs by combining on-line and off-line exhibition events to empower more firms to do business in easy ways.

The conference proved a major draw for 500 attendants, including exhibition organizers, SMEs, government officials, as well as industrial associations and experts from 30 regions of 16 countries.

An integration of e-commerce and off-line trade fairs can be a solution for exhibitors to be free from the time and area constraints and help the industry grow faster, Wang said. "We'll fight together against crisis through the platform provided by IEIA, and fortunately, the hardest time for exhibition sector is over now," he said.

Latest figures from National Bureau of Statistics have indicated that exports and imports fell softer in August than a month earlier to $103.7 billion and $88 billion.

According to Reed Huabo's Jiang, the overall exhibition industry stopped declining since late June, and some sectors dependent on domestic market has seen an upturn.

Despite the weak demand earlier this year, Jiang's firm expects to expand 20 percent in scale this year over last year given the industry's ample growth potential. The fair organizer saw a 40 percent year-on-year increase before the crisis.

The economic crisis has also opened up merger and acquisitions opportunities for the exhibition industry, comprised largely of small and speculative players, Jiang said.