History 2005: To Audit or not to Audit CeBIT Figures? (Editorial)

In 2004, CeBIT officially announced 6,411 booths for its 2004 show. This year, the event’s organizers officially announced 6,109 booths for the same 2004 show. As for the 2005 event, they officially announced 3 different figures for booths, depending on which published press release you believe: 6,270, 6,207 and 6,115.

“Sorry, we made an error,” said a spokesperson from the organization’s PR service. “The exact figure is 6,270. We will correct it. Thank you very much for noticing that.” 

You’re welcome.

And what about the the 6,411 booths for 2004 that has mysteriously diminished to 6,109 now? The same woman explained that an audit takes place after each year’s show, since certain companies are ultimately no-shows, or don’t pay the registration, and thus the statistics need to be revised. That said, a difference of 302, or around 5%, is not a minor correction.

In any case, before auditing, the number of displays at CeBIT has thus dropped by 2%. After auditing, this year’s number of booths represents 3% increase. With this little numbers game, the group will be able to claim growth year after year (watch as this year’s number is revised downward next year, before it is compared to a bloated projection of that year’s number of booths…).

The general impression seemed to be that this year, there were slightly more visitors over the 1st 3 days of the event, judging from the corridors of the convention hall and the crowds on public transport. Yet officially, CeBIT announced a figure of 480,000  visitors – less than the more than 500,000  expected this year, compared to 510,000 last year.

Even more important, for the show’s organizers: the exhibition space rented decreased by 1% to 308,881 square meters.

This confirmed the overall impression that display booths were slightly smaller, and that whole areas of the exhibition halls, particularly that of the main hall 1, especially appreciated by exhibitors, were reduced by partition dividers to wall off unused space.

In an annual tradition as amusing as it is unscientific, we compared the weights of the 2004 and 2005 catalogs: 2,239 grams compared to 2,287 grams last year, or a roughly 2% decrease in mass.

None of this changes the fact that CeBIT, in spite of its strong decline in 2004, continues for the moment to be the largest IT show in the world, even if it is transforming more and more into a consumer electronics event (competing with CES in Las Vegas, NV) with all the Asian companies, large and small, populating the exhibition.

This year there was even a giant computer game contest, while CeBIT also played host to a dance music award.

Even when we counted German subsidiaries of multinational firms as German, the number of foreign company booths was for the first time greater than half, for 52.5% exactly, from 69 countries, with a an Asian invasion (27% of all booths were for AsiaPac): 777 from Taiwan (+11%), 310 from China (+70%), 202 from South Korea (+22%), 176 from Hong Kong (+27%), matched by a corresponding decline in the U.S. presence with only 209 (-7%).

As far as  the storage industry was concerned, we counted fewer entries: 179 compared to 223 a year earlier, as well as the disappearance of some major names that had been present in the past, including FujiFilm, Hewlett-Packard, Imation and Philips. A few of the industry giants were there nevertheless, such as StorageTek, like EMC and directly across from them, NetApp, or Brocade, which neighbored McData, there were more delegates representing the company than visitors when we stopped by.

The general trend, then, was confirmed, namely that CeBIT no longer really interests IT managers, and is gradually becoming a European CES. The next CeBIT will be held March 9-15 2006, and unfortunately still in Hanover.

J.-J. M.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 207 on April 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.