ASSOCIATIONS

Trade Fairs in Germany: Number of visitors from China has doubled in four years
The international trade fairs in Germany are proving to be extremely attractive to buyers from East Asia. The number of visitors from the People's Republic of China has increased by 105% between 2002 and 2006 to a current total of 35,000. That was revealed by a survey re-cently completed by AUMA - Association of the German Trade Fair Industry.
The high-quality product ranges of German industry and the high level of internationality at the trade fairs are, in the opinion of AUMA, the reason that more and more Chinese import business is arranged in Germany. But not only China is making increasing use of the German trade fairs as procurement platforms. In 2006, 30% more visitors from India were registered than was the case four years ago. Strong increases have also been registered in numbers of buyers from Central and Eastern Europe: 45% more visitors came from Russia, 28% more from Poland and 21% more from the Czech Republic.
Overall last year, 2.13 mill. foreign visitors came to German trade fairs in order to gather information and to prepare for making decisions. Of the total, 1,400,000 (66%) came from the EU. A total of 320,000 visi-tors (15 %) was registered from the other European countries.
The countries of South, East and Central Asia provided 8% of the for-eign visitors, a total of 165,000, the Middle East 3.5 % and thus 75,000 visitors. 3% came from North America, 2% from Latin America.
Another 2% came from Africa, as well as 0.5 % from Australia and Oceania.