Trade fair boom in Moscow
"Let's pack our bags and go to Moscow!" Russian national poet Anton Chekhov proclaimed as early as 1901 in his work. It would be a fitting rallying call for numerous German trade fair bosses today
More and more of our domestic exhibition organisers are trying to get a foothold in the Russian market - and therefore into Moscow. "80 % of Russia's exhibition activity happens in the capital", says Norbert Schmidt, managing director of Messe Düsseldorf Moscow. The Rhinelanders are experts: They were the first foreign trade fair organisers to come to Russia in 1963 and have the experience to show for it.
Today the Düsseldorf company is no longer alone. Moscow is currently experiencing a veritable trade fair boom. This year German trade fair organisers will stage no fewer than 31 events in Russia, the Association of the German Trade Fair Industry (AUMA) reports. As a comparison: Two years ago it was just 20. Only China hosts more German foreign trade fairs. "Many companies use trade fairs as a way of penetrating the Russian market", is how Norbert Schmidt explains this popularity. The trade fair ranks very highly as a sales tool, explains Schmidt. You can't ignore trade fairs if you want to become established in Russia.
And now more and more companies are seeking to become established in the former Soviet Union. Like almost no other region in the world, Russia is experiencing dynamic growth. Since 1999, its gross domestic product has more than doubled to just below EUR 500 bn. Management consulting firm A. T. Kearney ranks Russia sixth in its league table of most attractive investment locations world-wide. And Germany's exhibition makers also hope to benefit from this influx of companies into the east. "Russia is a country where we want to grow intensively, says Cologne's exhibition company CEO Jochen Witt and speaks from the heart of many of his colleagues and competitors. The furniture suppliers fair Interzum is the first event to date that the Cologne company has transferred to Moscow in co-operation with the International Exhibitions Company (MVK). It is to be the first of many this year. According to the manager responsible, Oliver P. Kurth, Kölnmesse's negotiations for the transfer of the two trade fairs Photokina and Kind+Jugend are progressing well, as are plans to replace the current representative office with a subsidiary.
Besides the two Rhine-based companies in Cologne and Düsseldorf, the trade fair organisers from Frankfurt, Munich and Nuremberg have also gone to Moscow with sector shows from their own fields of competence. Leipzig and Essen are just about to follow suit. Essen, for example, recently opened a representative office in Moscow in collaboration with Messe Düsseldorf and now wants to stage its own event as quickly as possible.
But there is a snag. The Russian exhibition business has a capacity problem. Only around 500,000 m2 of hall space are available in Russia overall. That puts the total capacity at just about equal to the size of the Deutsche Messe AG's site in Hanover. Two-thirds of the hall capacity is located in Moscow distributed across several exhibition sites. The four most important locations are the comparatively old VVC and Sokolniki sites, the city centre site Krasnaya Presnya belonging to the Russian trade fair company ZAO Expocentr and the new Crocus Expo Center in the north-east of the city. Opened as recently as March 2004, it currently provides, like WC and Krasnaya Presnya, just under 100,000 m2 of exhibition space. But plans are already underway to expand the site because of the high capacity utilisation, primarily because more and more organisers want to move from their current sites to the very modern Crocus halls. For example, ITE - next to Messe Düsseldorf this British company is the most active foreign trade fair organiser in Russia - is gradually moving all its fairs from the Expocentr to Crocus Expo. That pleases the Düsseldorfer organisers: "We have a high space requirement and are glad to take any space that is freed up", says exhibition boss Werner Dornscheidt. For example, there is a waiting list for the Collection Premiere Moscow (CPM) because of the lack of space.
Messe Düsseldorf rules out any plans to move to Crocus. Dornscheidt is quite emphatic, "We have collaborated with Expocentr for over four decades. And that is not about to change".
This collaboration was recently evidenced by a credit guarantee for EUR 17 million to ZAO Expocentr as part of a site modernisation and expansion project. In return, the exhibition complex in Moscow's city centre guarantees the Düsseldorf trade fair company topic protection for its own events. Most other trade fair companies don't have such guarantees according to sector insiders - and some of their events are already being copied. Carsten Dierig
m+a report Nr.4 / 2006 vom 15.06.2006
m+a report vom 15. Juni 2006