Survey shows increase in visitors at CeBIT

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By Martyn Williams

(IDG) -- The bursting of the Internet bubble on world stock markets and the sluggish economy in the U.S. are not stopping visitors from attending the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, even though it may be weighing on the minds of exhibitors, the organizers said Sunday.

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By the end of the day Saturday more than 350,000 people had attended the fair, said Hubert H. Lange, member of the board of Deutsche Messe AG, at a press conference here marking the mid-point of the show. That figure is up on the 300,000 counted over the same three-day period last year, although some of the increase was attributed to a change in the way the organizers count visitors.

Lange was particularly pleased in an increase in the number of visitors from outside of Germany, which was 10,000 more than last year by the end of Saturday. Of these, 4,000 came from Asia followed by 2,000 from eastern Europe, 1,700 from Africa and 800 from the U.S.

The mood among exhibitors, while largely upbeat, was not as good as last year, according to the results of a survey carried among the fair's 8,100 exhibitors. In the wake of recent stock market and business turmoil, approximately 65 percent of exhibitors rated the economic perspective of the IT sector as good or very good, down from 75 percent last year. When asked about sales potential for their own businesses, 69 percent rated it as very good against 75 percent last year.

CeBIT, said Lange, was proving to be an "Aspirin against the hangover of the global stock market," and said everything was running well despite the bad weather. It rained for much of the first two days and snow greeted visitors on Sunday. "I refuse to accept the weather," he said. "We have never had weather like this before."

The CeBIT Web site was also attracting record traffic this year, said the organizers. Internet users in 159 countries pushed total page impressions to 32 million as of Saturday evening -- three times as many hits as the previous year. The mobile fair guide, which is for use in a PDA (personal digital assistant), had been downloaded 66,000 times up to Saturday evening.

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