TUBE 2008, DÜSSELDORF

TUBE DÜSSELDORF 2008 REPORT

According to statistics received from Messe Düsseldorf there were 1,028 exhibitors at this year’s Tube, occupying 41,187 m2 of exhibit space with a total of 32,900 visitors from 71 countries. The numbers of visitors showed an increase of nearly 10% from 2006 and of the total more than 50% were international.

Messe Düsseldorf’s event survey concluded that Tube visitors were interested primarily in tubes and accessories, tube production and processing machines, systems for the processing of tubes, and raw materials. 61% of visitors came from the industry, 21% from the retail and 7% from the trade sector. Pipelines and OCTG technologies were rated as attractive additions to the exhibition portfolio by 10% of visitors.

The ITA hopes that everyone who attended Tube Dusseldorf 2008 had a successful exhibition. For the record the ITA booth secured 272 enquiries, which was 20% more than 2006. Of these 49 were new member applications and in addition there were 4 member renewals. The ITA fully expects to convert a good number of the remaining enquiries into new memberships.

Feedback from the ITA’s post event questionnaires showed overwhelmingly that the new style booth and its facilities were rated either “very good” or “good”. These facilities were much in demand and the stand was extremely busy every day up to early afternoon on the last day.

The ITA stand at Tube 2008

Many exhibitors were very pleased with the quality of visitors to their booths and the comments of Dr. Ing. Joachim Schonbeck, Chairman of the Management Board of SMS Meer GmbH illustrate this point:” The two trade fairs, wire and Tube, have met all expectations we have of leading international trade fairs. For us they proved to be outstanding platforms with the expected high level of sophistication of the trade visitors”.

As far as the effect of the Metav exhibition was concerned ITA personnel were able to discuss this with a number of exhibitors and visitors and received very mixed responses. In particular those exhibiting in halls 7,8a and 8b were not in favour of a repeat in 2010. On the other hand several major exhibitors told the ITA that the addition of METAV had no effect on their participation in Tube 2008.

There was, however, a consensus that the size of the exhibition and the number of visitors put a tremendous strain on the local infrastructure as far as travel problems, hotel and restaurant availability and flights were concerned. Whilst Düsseldorf does host even larger events exhibitors and visitors at Tube 2008 were unaccustomed to such an influx of people.

It is apparent from conversations that exhibitors in halls 7, 8a and 8b were not as satisfied as those in other halls and a number of members have indicated already that they will be seeking to be part of the ITA exhibitor group in 2010. This also appears to be the case for companies without ITA memberships and will provide us with an opportunity to recruit more members.

There was strong interest amongst enquirers at the ITA booth in many of the forthcoming exhibitions and especially Tube China 2008, Tekno/Tube Arabia 2009 in Dubai and Tube Southeast Asia 2009 in Bangkok. Also of great interest was news of possible forthcoming ITA technical conferences.

The ITA is already receiving requests from members to be included in the Association’s exhibitor group for Tube 2010, the dates of which have not yet been confirmed