More than 500,000 professionals annually attend the big plastics industry trade shows worldwide, and with attendance rising at several of the events, this number seems primed to increase.
More than 148,000 industry leaders attended this spring’s Chinaplas conference in Shanghai. This represents an increase in turnout of about 15 percent. The annual Chinaplas event is the industry’s second largest gathering, with a 29 percent market share.
The top global player is the K Trade Fair in Dusseldorf, Germany, with a 43 percent share. Event planners hope the 2016 event in October will top its 2013 results of about 219,000 attendees. The second large European exhibition is the Fakuma show, held in Friedrichshafen, Germany. In 2015, that event garnered nearly 46,000 attendees, or about 9 percent of the worldwide audience.
Several trade shows target markets in the Americas. The Plastimagen exhibition this year in Mexico City drew nearly 30,000 attendees, or 6 percent of the global market. NPE, the event put on by SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association every three years, had attendance of nearly 66,000 at its last exhibition (13 percent worldwide share). That represented an 18 percent jump from the last iteration of NPE.
