CeBIT Continues to Shrink

The CeBIT exists since 1986 and continues to be the number one computer show in the world.

cebit_continues_to_shrink

But the event is shrinking drastically. In 2001, the event recorded 8,093 exhibitors and 849,252 visitors. Last year, the figures were 4,300 and 400,000 respectively. This year the organization announced 4,157 companies exhibiting from 68 countries and that "Through Friday [the fifth day of the event closing Saturday], average daily attendance at the show was up 3% year on year. The trade visitor ratio remained unchanged at more than 80%. One in every five CeBIT visitors was from outside Germany. A slight decrease in attendance from America was offset by larger numbers from Asia in 2010. European attendance was on a par with last year’s high attendance rates."

This number of exhibitors – 4,157 – doesn’t really reflect the reality as the organization doesn’t reveal the number of booths. "We don’t know", told us a CeBIT’ spokeswoman. The CeBIT doesn’t know how many booths it sells! Furthermore this year, their average surface was lower as a lot big IT companies were not exhibiting. Today the German show is mainly a place for small foreign vendors, especially from Asia, to find distributors in Europe. In storage, we counted more companies (159 vs. 132 in 2009), but the big ones didn’t have their own booth and were generally represented by their German distributors.

We were at CeBIT from Monday to Thursday and it seems to us that there was less visitors than last year. Just an example: the number of tramways on the main Hanover’s line, from the railroad station to the show, was considerably reduced and we had no difficulty to find an empty seat. We remember the time where it was like the crowded subway in Paris at 6PM.

We attend yearly several press conferences on storage. This year, we found only one on the subject, by the IBM Systems and Technology Group on Tuesday 2. And it was canceled for unknown reasons…

Each year, we also took the habit to weigh the official catalog: it was a record 2,484kg in 2003, 0,155kg last year, 0,149kg for the last one.

There was three big trends in storage: a lot of new USB 3.0 devices, SSDs and NAS.

The CeBIT 2011 will be staged from 1 to 5 March in Hanover.

Comments

Updated on March 8, 2010 at 6PM in Paris, France:

CeBIT has just officially announced there was 334,000 visitors during the five days of the event and that this figure increased by 3.7%, compared to 322,000 last year - where the show lasts six days.

But at the end of CeBIT 2009, the organization officially published the figure of 400,000.

It's not the first time we have remarked that, from one year to another one, the number corresponding to the preceding year was diminished to try to prove that the following edition was more successful! And once more, we will probably get the same explanation: the figure of the preceding year was not audited and finally lower.

Compared to 400,000, it means that the popularity of the German show continues to decrease, this year by 16.5% - and not increasing by 3.7%. Following our four-day visit, it confirms our opinion that the number of visitors decreased notably this year.