IMVEeurope.com: This is not really a news, but it came to my attention that Stuttgart, Germany Vision Show 2013 is switching to biennial format and this year it is cancelled. The reason is stated be be a maturing machine vision market, which means that there are now longer product innovation cycles.
"We are a little bit disappointed," said Lou Hermans, COO of CMOSIS. Hermans made the point that there is no event on a similar scale to Vision serving the European and US markets, and even shows like Automate in the USA are smaller by comparison. "This yearly opportunity to meet with a lot of our customers in a very efficient way and to present our products is not available [this year]," he said.
A lot of trade shows are moving to a biennial format. It's very expensive to exhibit at a show, and I've noticed shows becoming very repetitive because of a lack of new technologies to exhibit.
ReplyDeleteThis particular show is shrinking in size as well. They were down to one exhibition hall in 2012, and there seemed to be a lot of spare room in that hall.
The referred article in the post says:
Delete" For the 2012 show, organisers moved the trade fair to the larger, more prominent Hall 1 which offered exhibitors extra floor space, a record number of exhibitors registered and more than 7,000 visitors attended the three-day event."
In the meantime we were also informed that exhibition floor prices were increased with +60% ...
DeleteOne of the reason for the +60% price increase is probably to avoid that the money of the companies is spent on other shows in the odd years as the Vision show will only happen on even years.
DeleteUnfortunately Boston Vision show is also on even years.
Will the biannual show bring +60% more visitors and +60% more return. I doubt.
Will all small companies survive in 2013 without the big marketing event? I doubt.
There are a couple of other problems. The capabilities of machine vision cameras are well beyond the typical needs of the vast majority of industrial vision systems. For example, there are numerous good color imaging cameras and techniques around but real color is rarely needed in machine vision. When color is needed, it is often for very specialized applications like fruit sorting where special spectral bands are needed or color matching, where small gamuts but very accurate measurements are required. This keeps most systems integrators from even considering much beyond the basic cameras.
ReplyDeleteThe other problem is that most of the so-called vision camera suppliers actually sell more product in other markets, like embedded medical systems. The engineers designing those systems don't go to vision shows because the other things they need for their designs aren't there.
It is pretty easy to discover that there is really nowhere for those designers to go to see what they need. Automate is too far off the beam because of the high robotics content. Shows like Photonics West have little imaging of any kind. SPIE has set up a separate show a few days before SPIE that does have imaging but the cost of going to both is quite high. This is an odd situation since OSA holds their Electronic Imaging conference at the same time but has no exhibits. Next year, at least Photonics West and Electronics Imaging won't be separated by 15 miles but there is still no push to include imaging exhibitors.
I could go on and on about this but I'll stop now because there is no good conclusion to be drawn.
I fully agree with your point on PW and EI.
DeleteWith the lack of good shows in the end of 2013, PW will probably have more machine vision content. There seem to be a trend towards this in the past few years.
One other reason for the 2-year cycle was that the organizers shifted the Vision Show from November to September. So all developers, marketing and so on coudn't have holidays in August - which was a typical month for germany.
ReplyDeleteThe reason was another huge fair for hall 1 in November. Bocked for every second year. Finally, the Vision is in the other year, same hall, same time. If you get confused with the date, you can watch welding machines working and so on...
The selected week in November, since many years, is a holiday week in other countried (Nov 1st and Nov 11th) and therefore the selection of one of those weeks is also potentially limiting the amount of foreign exhibitors and attendees.
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