The technology industry has just witnessed unthinkable: the cancellation of one of the world’s biggest trade shows, barely 10 days before it was due to kick off.
Just hours after show organisers GSMA insisted the show would go on, the CEO of GSMA, John Hoffman, issued a statement announcing its canning.
“With due regard to the safe and healthy environment in Barcelona and the host country today, the GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event,” he said. “The GSMA and the Host City Parties will continue to be working in unison and supporting each other for MWC Barcelona 2021 and future editions. Our sympathies at this time are with those affected in China, and all around the world.”
The cancellation comes as numerous heavyweight exhibitors pulled out due to fears of COVID-19, the coronavirus. These included Ericsson, Intel, Amazon, Nvidia, Sony, ZTE, Cisco, Amdocs, and Facebook. Others, like TCL, Xiaomi, Huawei, and Samsung all announced they had scaled down their activities.
GSMA initially insisted that, with 2,800 exhibitors, it had enough safeguards in place to ensure the event would go on. However, it appears to have pre-empted a bandwagon of further withdrawals.
The cancellation will force numerous major industry players to rethink their launch strategies. Few seemed to have contingency plans in place, with Ericsson and Sony notable exceptions.
Ericsson, the first major exhibitor to withdraw, included in its announcement last Friday, 7 February, that it would showcase the company’s portfolio and innovations in local events.
“Ericsson will take the demos and content created for MWC Barcelona to customers in their home markets with local events called ‘Ericsson Unboxed’,” it announced.
Sony said its press conference would still take place at the scheduled time of 8:30am Central European Time on February 24, but “as a video via our official Xperia YouTube channel”.
Other exhibitors may well turn to similar strategies, but smaller businesses that had hoped MWC would put them on the map will have to pursue traditional marketing strategies. Those that had hoped to showcase breakthrough technologies or demonstrate the possibilities of 5G, for example, will have to look to alternative events.
ShowStoppers, a major preview event and media attraction at MWC every year, had announced on Tuesday it would still go ahead, but had no option in announcing its cancellation a day later. However, it runs the event at most major tech expos, and will have the opportunity to pull exhibitors into other regional shows.
“We will continue to collaborate with GSMA,” said ShowStoppers partner Steve Leon. “We look forward to connecting journalists with our partner companies as they launch new products and technologies at ShowStoppers events planned for MWC Los Angeles 2020, IFA 2020 in Berlin, CES 2021 in Las Vegas, and, of course, MWC Barcelona 2021.”
IFA, held in Berlin every year at the end of August, is the world’s biggest tech expo by attendees, although not by floorspace. However, it is likely to be given a massive boost this year as it attracts many of the launches that would have been confined to MWC. The Los Angeles MWC event, due in October, is tiny by comparison, drawing just over 20,000 attendees, and is unlikely to take up the slack.
Visit the next page to read about the knock-on impact of the cancellation and to see who is the big winner of MWC being cancelled.
With more than 100,000 attendees originally expected at MWC Barcelona, the cancellation will be a major blow for airlines across Europe, and the hospitality and tourism industry in Barcelona. Almost all hotels in the city are fully booked during the event, taxis are permanently busy, and most restaurants are full at night. Now, Barcelona may well resemble a ghost town, as the regular tourist trade would have been turned away by the lack of flights and accommodation – and it is both inappropriate and too late to market the city as a destination for that week.
For major brands who have to rethink launch strategies, marketing budgets will be strained, and launch campaigns could be set back by weeks or even months. This will put further constraints on a mobile industry already reeling from the impact of the coronavirus on manufacturing in China. Supply chains, shipping, and other logistics are also in disarray. Now add marketing to the list of casualties.
There is one big winner from the cancellation of MWC: Samsung, which launched its new range of mobile devices at a stand-alone event in San Francisco on Tuesday (link here). Samsung decoupled its annual Galaxy Unpacked event from MWC two years ago, after running it on the eve of MWC in Barcelona every year since the launch of the Galaxy S2 in 2011. The Galaxy S9 in 2018 was the last flagship Samsung phone to be launched at MWC.
A key reason for the decoupling, giving Samsung blanket coverage on launch day and pre-empting announcements by rivals, suddenly looks like a stroke of genius. The likes of Huawei, Sony, LG, Xiaomi, Nokia, Vivo, Oppo and OnePlus now all have to rely on online or delayed events for the launches planned this month. Apple never exhibits at industry expos, and keeps its iPhone launches to September, when it can unveil new devices in time for the holiday market.
Samsung does not have it all its own way, however. Its fiercest rival, aside from Apple, is Huawei, which also does not launch its flagship phones at MWC. While it was expected to launch the sequel to its Mate X foldable phone, that is not the device that will drive its market share.
Rather, Huawei is counting on the new P40 range to re-establish it as a technology leader, following Google pulling the plug on Android being included in the manufacturer’s devices. The launch is expected to take place at a stand-alone event in Paris in late March. Huawei was expected to showcase its own operating system, Horizon OS, during MWC, but will now probably do so in local events and combine it with the launch of the P40. It is also likely to include the new foldable device in that event.
The 6-week gap between the Samsung and Huawei flagship launches will also probably give the latter the chance to tweak the specs on its phones to be more competitive with the S20 range, which has pushed the boundaries of video and zoom technology.
Not that it’s all good news for Samsung. Despite moving Galaxy Unpacked from Barcelona, it still used MWC to launch its new tablet ranges. It will have to rethink that roll-out and marketing strategy.
Even for those who are unscathed in the immediate aftermath, the cancellation is bad news: it highlights the vulnerability of the industry as a whole to geopolitical events, and reduces the appeal of the sector to investors. If the coronavirus is not contained in the coming months, a mobile industry that is already relatively stagnant will experience a sharp decline.
- Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee