SINGAPORE-The Asia-Pacific currency crisis has taken its toll on the Personal Communications Industry Association’s first venture into the international trade-show arena. Wireless Showcase Asia, held here last week and touted as the first all-wireless show in the region, drew only limited attendance from outside Singapore.
Final attendance figures for the show were not yet available late last week. PCIA originally had estimated 5,000 attendees, but show-floor traffic did not seem to be at that level.
Exhibitors numbered about 65, with Lucent Technologies Inc., Northern Telecom Ltd., Qualcomm Inc. and Sony Corp. representing the largest vendor presence. Conspicuously absent from the exhibitor list were L.M. Ericsson, Motorola Inc. and Nokia Corp., the three largest handset vendors in the region.
With the economic situation putting a strain on the region, many companies have frozen their travel budgets, reported one exhibitor. Therefore, a majority of the attendees were local.
“We can’t deny that … there has been an impact on the show [from the currency crisis],” said PCIA President Jay Kitchen. “Obviously when companies are faced with the financial crisis as some of them are, and you’re choosing between laying off people or going to a show, it’s not much of a challenge to figure out what the answer is going to be.”
The show also directly preceded the Chinese and Malaysian New Year celebrations, as well as the end of the Muslim fasting holiday of Ramadan, which also could have lowered attendance at the show.
Kitchen said the lower-than-expected attendance would not deter PCIA from its new focus on the international market. “Our board has made the decision that PCIA is going to be an international organization,” he said.
“PCIA is taking a real leadership role and displaying a lot of vision in coming over to Asia to promote the wireless industry,” said Kitchen. “This is one of the hotbeds of future markets for wireless.”
It’s important, too, to remember that all shows start out small, he concluded, citing the first PCIA show in 1994 in Seattle, which drew just 5,000 attendees. Last fall’s show in Dallas, in comparison, drew 23,000.
This is just the first of PCIA’s planned events covering world regions. It has incorporated a Latin American component-called PCS Latin America-into its U.S. show next fall. The organization also is in the early stages of planning for shows in other, unspecified regions, said Kitchen.
