Trade fair industry in Asia expanded in 2008

According to the 5th edition of popular annual Trade Fairs in Asia report, jointly produced by BSG and UFI, the exhibitions industry in the region expanded by 8.7% in 2008 despite the weakening global economic environment.

For full press release, see our corporate blog, or the BSG web site where you can also find information on ordering the report.

The strategy is to be on as many of the e-readers as possible

Two interesting points from this clip:

1. Lighthouse Media's Marketing is a really interesting and aggressive competitor in the marketing B2B media space in Asia. It's giving Haymarket's venerable Media a good run for its money these days and interesting to see them experimenting with video as another channel. I wonder how they'll make money from it, though? Google isn't very generous with sharing its YouTube gains.

2. The FT's approach to e-readers, as explained here by Greg Zorthian, global circulation director for the Financial Times is very catholic. They're spreading they're bets across the whole e-reader world and who can blame them. Nobody at this stage really knows where the technology will settle although they can be fairly confident that it's not likely to paper in the long term.

"Healthy and stable"

How many B2B media CEOs have been able to use that phrase this year in describing their companies' finances? Not many. And, in fact, the CEO who said that, didn't use exactly those words. He said "gesund und stabil" and the company in question is Deutsche Fachverlag from Frankfurt. The CEO, Klaus Kottmeier.

Thanks to Hugo E. Martin for his summary of their results. Brush up German, guys to read Hugo's post or the DFV press release. For those who can't manage it, highlights are:

Overall sales: up 2% at €135.7mn
Events sales: up 20.4% at €5.9 mn
Online sales: up 20% at €5.4 mn
Over-seas revenues: up 10% at €27.8 mn

Print, of course, took a bit of a pasting and was was down 8.6% at €91mn. Mind you, most magazine CEOs would look very kindly on a publisher who brought a single digit decline in advertising revenues to a review meeting.

This was the first year that DFV is including results from its investment in Indian publisher Images Multimedia Group.

Former UBM Asia CFO has new job

My friend and former colleague John Day is taking on a new role at United Business Media. He's taking on the role of CEO at UBM Global Trade, the division which includes the PIERS Global Intelligence Solutions and Journal of Commerce branded events, news and analytical content. Since stepping aside as CFO at CMP Media in Manhasset, he has been running RISI, Inc. (née Paperloop), a business in which UBM has the majority stake.

Prior to all that, about a decade ago now, John worked for five years in Hong Kong as CFO of what was then Miller Freeman Asia. That business, a boon to business card printers, has since been renamed CMP Asia and now UBM Asia.

This may not seem like the most auspicious time to take on a shipping and trade portfolio. As I sailed to the Philippines over Easter, the number container ships laid up in the international waters just off Hong Kong that we passed was quite staggering. But, John's timing may be good; there's only one way to go from where we are today....and it surely ain't down.

Campaign-ing in China

Our friends at Haymarket in Asia were a little slow to climb onto the online bandwagon. But, having firmly pointed themselves in a web-oriented direction over the past 12 months, appear to be charging off towards Internet glory.

Titles such as Media and CEI now have fully-fledged e-offerings which we are finding very useful. It was useful to see today (thanks to Thomas Crampton for this, now at Ogilvy and generally source of all that is considered wisdom on online media) that Haymarket founder Michael Heseltine's first love, Campaign, is now emerging as a brand with this new Chinese website.

Just to add a further Crampton twist to this. He twittered (as he does) about how good the Google translation of the new site was. Check it out for yourself. It's not bad.

Shanghai motor show bucks the trend

It was looking as though motor shows the world over were going to be the biggest events industry victims of the economic downturn. The London show for 2010 has already announced that it's not going ahead, major exhibitors decided to skip Tokyo.

But then comes the news from Shanghai. Porsche is launching its Panamerica model there:



Note the comment on China's car market having overtaken that of the US this year. It's a scary thought but one which has auto industry CEOs salivating. More press comment here:

Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124011142338932255.html#mod=rss_whats_news_us
HK Standard: http://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking_news_detail.asp?id=13800
AP: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/04/20/ap6309546.html

Pat McGovern on growing through the recession

IDG founder Pat McGovern gives an interesting interview at Mediashift about how his business is growing in tough times; the aggressive move online being at the heart of things in his opinion. There are inevitably a number of interesting references to China and India:

So have you launched any print publications lately?

McGovern: We're a global company, and in India print is hot, and only 3% of people have Internet access. The number of people learning English is developing nicely, and there are some other smaller countries where we have launched print publications. We launched ComputerWorld Pakistan recently. In the U.S., I don't see us launching print business publications. For consumer titles, in China, we publish about 20 print publications. We are the only international company able to publish magazines in China because we made an investment there before there was a prohibition on foreign investment.

There's now 450 million Internet users in China, more than the U.S., so the advertisers decided to shift ads from being 20% online to about 60% online, so we've seen a corresponding jump in online usage for our B2B titles.

McGovern also points to the massively larger number of mobile phones in India than mobile users to suggest that this medium may be more important than online as that market moves away from print. As regular readers of this blog will know, that's a point we've been banging on about for the past 2 years.

Thanks to Hugo E. Martin for pointing this interview out via a Facebook posting.