wire 2008, Düsseldorf

 

WIRE DÜSSELDORF 2008 SHOW REPORT

According to statistics received from Messe Düsseldorf there were 1,129 exhibitors at this year’s wire, occupying 53,358 m2 of exhibit space with a total of 40,700 visitors from 72 countries.  The numbers of visitors showed an increase of 4% from 2006 and of the total 58% were international.

Messe Düsseldorf’s event survey concluded that wire visitors were interested primarily in machines and systems for wire production and processing, materials, speciality wire and cables, testing technology, measuring and control technology as well as process engineering tools.  Visitors were mainly from the industry (80%), retail (8%) and trade sector (4%).  The areas of environmental technology and energy efficiency and logistics were considered to be important additions to the exhibition’s categories by 10% of visitors.

The IWMA hopes that everyone who attended wire Dusseldorf 2008 had a successful exhibition.  For the record the IWMA booth secured 200 enquiries, which was 20% more than 2006.  Of these 8 were new member applications. The IWMA fully expects to convert a good number of the remaining enquiries into new memberships. 

Feedback from the IWMA’s post event questionnaires showed overwhelmingly that the new style booth and its facilities were rated either “very good” or “good”.  These facilities were much in demand and the stand was extremely busy every day up to early afternoon on the last day.

Many exhibitors were very pleased with the quality of visitors to their booths and the comments of Dr. Ing. Joachim Schonbeck, Chairman of the Management Board of SMS Meer GmbH illustrate this point:” The two trade fairs, wire and Tube, have met all expectations we have of leading international trade fairs.  For us they proved to be outstanding platforms with the expected high level of sophistication of the trade visitors”.

As far as the effect of the Metav exhibition was concerned IWMA personnel were able to discuss this with a number of exhibitors and visitors and received very mixed responses.   In particular those who had to vacate halls 16 and 17 from the 2006 event were not in favour of a repeat in 2010.  On the other hand several major exhibitors told the IWMA that the addition of METAV had no effect on their participation in wire 2008. 

There was, however, a consensus that the size of the exhibition and the number of visitors put a tremendous strain on the local infrastructure as far as travel problems, hotel and restaurant availability and flights were concerned.  Whilst Düsseldorf does host even larger events, exhibitors and visitors at wire 2008 were unaccustomed to such an influx of people.

There was strong interest amongst enquirers at the IWMA booth in many of the forthcoming exhibitions and especially wire China 2008, Tekno/Tube Arabia 2009 in Dubai and wire Southeast Asia 2009 in Bangkok. Also of great interest was news of possible forthcoming IWMA technical conferences and the directory website www.wirefirst.com

The IWMA is already receiving requests from members to be included in the Association’s exhibitor group for wire 2010, the date of which is yet to be confirmed.