Vendors Shun CeBIT Show Cut
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Vendors are deserting the German Government funded International CeBIT IT trade show in droves. The move is so bad that the organisers have decided to cut the International show by one day due to declining interest by both visitors and International vendors like Motorola, Nokia etc.

In Australia CeBIT has struggled to make a profit with the bulk of the show being overseas vendors who are financially funded in part by foreign governments to attend the Australian show in an effort to drum up business in this Country.  Last year the big boys of the IT Industry failed to show up at the Australia CeBIT which is held at Sydney’s Darling Harbour. Among the organisations to no bill the event were Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Canon, Fujitsu, Cisco, Toshiba, Lenova and Acer.

Also missing were the top three, notebook, PC, server and printer vendors along with the top 3 storage and network vendors.

CeBIT in Australia is run by Hanover Fairs a Company owned by the German Government. This is the same organisation that claimed  that it was unable to run a Consumer Electronics event in Australia without an injection of funding from a Local or Federal Government. It is the same organisation who also blamed the Victorian Government for not coming to the party to fund the failed Intelligent Home Show held in Melbourne.   

One organisation that does tip money in to support the Hanover Fair CeBIT events is the NSW Government and as such the NSW Premier gets a gig at the event.  Ernst Raue, one of the CeBIT fair’s International managers, said this week that  the price structure for exhibitors at the International show would be changed and organisers would concentrate more on attracting foreign companies and orientate themselves more clearly toward trade visitors.

This year, he told a news conference, the fair expected about 6,000 exhibitors. Last year, 6,262 attended, while visitor numbers dropped for the fifth year in a row to 450,000 — 6 percent fewer than a year earlier. Raue said exhibitors’ main complaints about the fair were high costs, an unclear concept and no real sense that the fair was more for trade visitors than for consumers.

This year’s CeBIT will run from March 15-21 in Hanover.