History (1998): WW Largest Computer Show CeBIT in Full Bloom

Founded in 1970, when it was known as the Hannover Messe (Hanover Fair), CeBIT is aging well.

The world’s largest computer expo, a yearly March event in Hanover, Germany, has become unstoppable. It is nearly 3x larger than Comdex Fall, the second largest just after it, both in terms of the number of booths and attendees. Most recently, there were roughly 2,200 booths and 220,000 visitors at Comdex ’97, compared to 7,250 displays and approximately 670,000 people at this year’s CeBIT.

These figures continue to grow, year after year, although the record of 755,000 attendees, set in 1995, has yet to be repeated, the year when organizers set up a separate CeBIT Home dedicated to mass-market computing.

It is, in fact, impossible to visit all 25 halls of the German expo, which is in danger of suffering from its excessive size.

It might be a good idea in the future to combine telecom, and/or banking applications, or even office furniture in a separate expo, which at least would bring the event back down to a human scale.

It’s certainly a major accomplishment for the city of Hanover, which keeps the keys of this fruitful venture, to pull off an operation of this size, particularly in a city where no one has ever gone for a vacation, where the tourist (especially hotel) infrastructure is pitiful (most attendees are obliged to find private accommodations) and where the transportation to the event itself, whether by plane, car or tram, is full to bursting each morning.

All this is likely to change, because Hanover is currently analyzing all these logistical details in preparation for the Universal Exposition in 2000, which will ultimately benefit the computer show.

CeBIT’s success is not only popular, but also commercial. In addition to charging for the booths, the expo recoups an entrance fee from each visitor, not cheap at DM50 ($30) per day, not counting the enormous catalogue (DM36 or $21) which gets bigger with each passing year.

By the end of the ’98 session, 90% of the participants had already made plans to come back next year.

A few noteworthy statistics from this year’s CeBIT:
– 120,000 foreign visitors, out of 670,000 total, with Germans making up the majority of them (and participants: 4,526 booths out of 7,250) to an event that claims to be international;
– 63,000 visitors from the European Union, 16,000 from Eastern Europe, 15,000 from Asia and only 6,800 from the Americas;
– Oddly, it was Taiwan that had the largest group of exhibitors (502) from outside Germany, surpassing the US (with 411) for the first time.

In the end, we go to Hanover to make contacts, while at Comdex, far more new and important products are announced.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 123 on April 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.

Note: CeBIT died in 2018 after 33 years of annual IT exhibition.