Scandinavia overview
Mikael Jansson, CEO of Fairlink
When I started 20 years ago, approximately 90 per cent of our exhibitions were organised by our venues. Now I think the same is happening in Scandinavia that we see in other countries: You have to have more and more market knowledge to organise an exhibition. At first, venues wanted to organise for themselves but now they realise that other organisers are necessary.
The Nordic Countries used to be a closed territory for foreign organisers. The venue owners organised almost every show by themselves. Things are different now. Venues still organise a large number of shows but the attitude towards foreign organisers has changed. Every venue owner is now open to discuss with foreign organisers the possibility of bringing new shows to the Nordic countries.
Access is easy; communications and infrastructure are very good. The people and companies are early adopters, and exhibition facilities are large and modern.
The Scandinavian market is not especially big but it is an interesting one. If you are a British or American organiser, for example, it might not seem too different, but if you compare us with new markets such as China or India there would be big changes in coming to Scandinavia. For instance, an international organiser will have close cooperation with the venue and organiser because they know the Scandinavian market very well. You could have a cooperative partner that has been in the market for a long time.
One of the biggest changes we are seeing is in the minds of venue owners. In the past, venues just didn’t have the space; they were full all year round. It used to be that they could only have one show at a time but now they have built and expanded venues to contain two or three shows at a time. Now shows won’t disturb each other, which opens more possibilities. They can offer organisers more flexibility this way.
Scandinavia used to be a very protective market. The venues thought they should organise as much as possible by themselves. Now it has become more and more demanding to do a good show. They seek more cooperation with each other and with organisers from abroad. We are also seeing a generational shift. Some people are coming from other businesses and some are young and hungry. They are open to new ideas and new cooperation.
Sweden is the biggest market and Swedish and Finnish economies have done best during the difficult economic times in the last two years. Of course we have lost some big shows, but the problem has been with the middle-level shows. These shows had lots of problems and many simply do not exist any more. Now visitors are starting to come back to the shows and in August and September the square-metre sales also made a comeback.
There is a good deal of cooperation between the four Scandinavian countries. The largest organisers in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland are members of the Scandinavian exhibition association Fairlink.
Sweden, where Fairlink is based, is a small region. We have a couple of shows that are very international - for instance Elmia Wood and the Stockholm Furniture Fair - but most of the shows in Sweden are national-level.
As we grow, our fairs we aren’t just looking to bring international business to Scandinavia, but also to expand our shows internationally and improve our representation in other countries.
Finland
Pentti Kivinen, MD The Finnish Fair Corporation, Helsinki
The biggest challenge for The Finnish Fair Corporation, as the largest exhibition organiser in Finland, and to the wider exhibition industry in Finland, is to make it easier for exhibitors to participate and to enable exhibitors and visitors to meet more efficiently face-to-face. We have been focusing on developing our products and services, and this has included building different event packages where related sectors, products or services and relevant experts can all be brought together in one place at the same time.
The Finnish Fair Corporation organises about 70 exhibitions at The Helsinki Exhibition and Convention Centre in a year. Turnover of the Exhibition Group was €30.5m (US$41m) last year. In 2009, The Helsinki Exhibition and Convention Centre had a total of over one million visitors to fairs, meetings, congresses and other events, and 9,381 exhibitors representing companies or other organisations.
The trade fair sector is not immune to economic cycles. The deep recession affected Finland’s national economy and the trade fair business volume dropped by around 10 per cent. Despite cuts to corporate marketing investments during these difficult times, fairs are still being attended and companies still want to meet their stakeholders. Last year the total number of visitors for events rose in comparison to the corresponding fairs’ previous editions. As an exhibition organiser, we consider other media as the biggest competitors to the industry. However, other media saw an even sharper decline during the crisis, averaging 20 per cent.
As we all know, the car and motorcycle industries have had serious difficulties in past years, which resulted in our having to cancel the Motorcycle Exhibition and Car Show in 2009. The recession most affected the technology, industry and transport sectors. In 2009, consumer fairs recorded the highest growth in visitor numbers, and fairs dealing with home and living as well as recreation are popular among visitors. But what is more important is that we launched 10 new events last year. The new events are in a variety of consumer and business sectors.
The most common challenge today is related to the fact that companies make the decision to participate in exhibitions much later than before. This is a big challenge for us – we must be able to plan to make a good event. Of course, exhibitions compete with visitors’ time and interest. Exhibitions are significant marketing investments to the exhibitors, so we must enable these face-to-face contacts.
Denmark
Arne Bang Mikkelsen, CEO Bella Center, Copenhagen
The biggest challenge to the Danish exhibition industry is the fact that the financial crisis has influenced many industries in Denmark in a bad way. Often companies end up trying to save money on their marketing budget, which means they end up cutting their trade fair budget, which in turn means our fairs will become smaller and less profitable.
All our consumer fairs have been negatively influenced by the recession. Our Car Show, Boat Show, Fashion Fair and Jewellery Fair all shrank on average by 15 per cent.
Bella Centre has 34 fairs lined up in 2010, and my guess is we will have 125 exhibitors on average. Some of our big fairs have lost 10 to 15 per cent of their exhibitors due to the financial crisis. Last year, we had around 1 million visitors, which is a little higher than the level in 2008. In 2010 we have 10 new fairs and events. Because of this, I expect the number of exhibitors to be on the same level as 2009.
Denmark is not a big country, with a population of only 5.4m people. Therefore many of our industries are not big, which means it often is hard to make the fairs big enough to be profitable.
Our biggest competitors are Stockholm Fair Centre and Göteborg Fair Center (Svenska Mässan). Our goal is to have the number one exhibition industry in Scandinavia, because most international companies see this region as a single market.
Sweden
Patric Sjöberg, CEO, Stockhomsmässan, Stockholm
During 2009 we hosted 77 exhibitions, which was a normal figure for Stockholmsmässan. Most of these were our own exhibitions with a smaller share of guest events. This share is, however, increasing. We had 1.1m visitors during 2009, of which just over 800,000 visited one of our exhibitions.
Our own exhibitions account for over half our annual sales. The sales figure usually varies between US$72m and $100m per year since several of the large exhibitions are bi-annual. In short, you could say that the large ones are getting larger whereas some of the smaller events struggle with declining numbers of visitors. The exhibition length hasn’t changed during the last year.
We have had one cancellation, a trade exhibition called Scanlab. Our partner, the Swedish Labtech organisation, decided to run the next event in 2012 instead of 2011.
There are two new and two old shows coming back to Stockholmsmässan. Both the motorcycle exhibition På Två Hjul (“On Two Wheels”, a consumer show) and the audiovisual exhibition LLB (a trade show) were held at Stockholmsmässan some years ago and are now coming back to us, which we of course are very pleased with.
A new exhibition is Spara & Placera (“Savings & Investments”), a consumer show focused on financial issues for families and individuals. We will launch this exhibition in early October and it will run simultaneously with two other consumer shows focusing on interior design and children, respectively.
We have found that this way of presenting parallel shows with different topics but related audiences is very popular among our visitors. We recently extended our venue by 10,000 square metres making it easier to run several parallel events.
Another new exhibition is IPX India (International Paper Exhibition), which is launched by our subsidiary Adforum.
The manufacturing industry and the exhibitions connected with this area were most affected, whereas the exhibitions within interior design, leisure and construction have had a more positive development.
For many of our exhibitions we maintain well-developed relationships with the trade association involved, which makes content planning and finding the right target groups easier. A constant challenge, however, is to organise our own work as efficiently as possible. Over the last two years, we have put a lot of effort into streamlining our internal processes and making all our back-office support operate as smoothly as possible.
Another challenge which we find very exciting is to find the best possible ways for our face-to-face meetings to interact with the digital meeting opportunities provided nowadays. For example, we are looking into ways for visitors to interact both with each other and with us to plan their visit. We cooperate with a company called Matchmeeting providing such services, and we also work with social media such as Facebook.
Norway
Stig Nitter Foss, MD Norges Varemesse, Lillestrom
The biggest challenges to the Norwegian exhibition industry include the general decline in visitor numbers over the last decade, and the loss of the young generation of visitors. 2010 has been quite a difficult year compared to 2009. Trade fairs are suffering from the recession but holding up.
We are the only large hall owner in Norway and financially very sound. Due to the Norwegian market size we are quite dominant. About 40 to 50 per cent of the Norwegian market is in our premises. The value of our shows is about €50m per year.
We organise 15 shows annually, both national and international. We have more organisers from outside the country compared with the rest of Scandinavia. Festivals are growing. We have to incorporate festival thinking into our shows towards the general public.
Picture: Mikael Jansson