CeBIT’s new style brings a terrific year

After a few years of falling visitor numbers and the loss of several large exhibitors, the management of the Deutsche Messe in Hanover decided to try a change of tactics. The new starting point became the need for solutions for companies and visitors. In other words, CeBIT now concentrates more on the demand from the market than on what the market is able to offer. They have also shortened the fair by one day, bringing it to six days in total.

Success

This new approach seems to have been very successful. Despite the shorter duration of the fair, it attracted 3% more visitors than last year. Slightly less than half a million visitors attended in total, 100,000 of whom came from outside of Germany and the 5,845 exhibitors from more than 77 countries declared themselves very happy with their filled order books. Most had already beaten their results from the 2007 show by last Friday, two days before the fair ended.

New style

Part of CeBIT’s ‘new style’ was the close collaboration between Germany and France and partnering countries in ICT, and a number of specific ICT designs were put into the spotlight this year. Examples of these designs include subjects like ‘Green IT’, ‘IT Fitness’, ‘Woman@CeBIT’ and the CeBIT Global Conferences. These are all subjects which are highly popular at the moment. Woman@CeBIT coincided with International Woman's Day last Saturday and this led to a large presence of the target audience at the conference and at the fair as a whole. On that day, no less than 25% of all attendees were woman.

In the area of ‘IT Fitness’, a lot of attention was paid to the high demand for IT professionals. In Germany alone, there are currently no less than 43,000 job openings in the IT business. Many companies promoted themselves during CeBIT as the best employer, with the nicest projects and limitless career opportunities! So it’s no wonder that CeBIT attracted thousands of students and IT professionals. This year, the number of visitors who were younger than 30 was 14% higher than in 2007.

VIP

Completely in line with CeBIT traditions, the fair was opened by the German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, and because of the collaboration with France this year, President Nicolas Sarkozy was also present. To make the VIP party complete and to give the fair even more flair, the Chairman of the European Commission, José Manuel Baroso and Microsoft top man Steve Ballmer also stopped by.

Navigation

For the first days of CeBIT, the yourNAV team also visited Hanover. Our attention was mainly focussed on Halls 14 and 15, where companies from the satellite navigation market showed their new goods. Aside from the major players like TomTom, Garmin, Mio and Tele Atlas, there were also a lot of smaller, Far Eastern, companies present this year.

There was a big contrast between the huge stands of, for example, navigational software manufacturer Nav ‘N’ Go, where bright lights, video screens, cars and ‘booth babes’ were used to attract the attention of the visitor; and the very small cubicles where smaller, mostly Taiwanese, merchants were displaying their products. These mostly sat at some sort of kitchen table with maybe no more than two or three of their products displayed, accompanied by documentation in only their local language. Needless to say, these people where completely overblown by the presentation power of the market leaders. And yet, every year, there is a real ‘Asia Pavilion’ for GPS devices in the CeBIT halls as well.

CeBIT also enabled us to judge the most recent trends in navigational land. The most popular innovation was an increasing number of systems which include a TV function next to the navigation features. Other brands focussed more on 3D navigation and the integration of “plus” services into the navigational system. Examples of such services are traffic information, the search for free parking space and more intelligent route planning. The development of navigational functions on mobile phones is clearly still going strong too.

Satisfied

Ernst Raue, member of the board of management of the Deutsche Messe is a satisfied man. “The new CeBIT style has proved to be a success in all areas”, he says. “We received enthusiastic reactions from both exhibitors and visitors. We kept our promise we made last year. The new CeBIT has immediately created a new image for itself, with its more thematic construction and contents. The industry has also shown they are aware of their responsibilities with regards to the environment at CeBIT.”

Raue and his management partners will almost immediately now start work on the organisation of next years CeBIT. Whatever themes and issues will be in the spotlight by then is still unknown. What we do know is that the organisers are on course to make CeBIT 2009 as big a success as this year has been. Next year, CeBIT will also last six days: from Tuesday 3rd until Sunday 8th March.

Special

The yourNAV team have reported on all the navigational news during CeBIT in Hanover. In our CeBIT 2008 special, you’ll find all our CeBIT news nicely listed…