Obama and the trade fair industry

He is, even in advance of Tuesday's inauguration, being credited with miraculous powers. Put a wand in his hand, some seem to feel, and Barack "Harry Potter" Obama will defeat the forces of evil and send us all off to some economic equivalent of Honeydukes Sweetshop to eat Bertie Botts' beans until we are sick.

I hadn't seen a trade fair industry twist to the new President's apparently miraculous powers until reading this piece from TradeShow Week. There is actually a serious point here: international participation in US shows did suffer badly after the security clampdowns which followed 9/11. Some actually pointed to that as one of the contributing factors to the demise of Comdex.

I was under the impression that things had improved. But, the TradeShow Week piece quotes Charles Olentine, executive vice president of the U.S. Poultry & Egg Assn., saying that "he's looking forward to how changes might impact the association's Intl. Poultry Exposition". More than 10% of that event's visitors are international and the Olentine is quoted saying that "One of the major difficulties the show faces in attracting them is visa restrictions".

Apparently, the industry is hoping that Obama's pledge to rebuild ties with the rest of the world will extend to making it easier for business visitors to get into the US (or even just into the increasingly miserable US embassies around the world). We shall see. I suspect he may have higher priorities. And, Bush's great legacy to American bureaucracy, the Dept. of Homeland Security has just made it harder for people even from the visa waiver countries to get in by implementing the new ESTA computerised pre-notification system.

It seems I was not the first to think of the Harry Potter link. In doing a quick search here, I discover that The Spoof has decided that the young magician would be the perfect nominee for Deputy Secretary of Commece. Given Bill Richardson's withdrawal from the top job, perhaps young Harry can simply step up and magic along some US exports.

Thoughts from Nanjing

Just arrived in a very frosty Nanjing for the annual CEFCO meeting of China's exhibition industry. The conference, which usually attracts around 500 people, is titled "Forging Ahead Against Crisis" and it will be interesting to take the temperature of the industry both here in China and from around the world. I hope it's warmer than the weather which has warmed up at midday to 4° from a 'challenging' -6°overnight.

The mood won't, though, be much helped by the news that, according to the BBC, "China's exports have dropped into their biggest decline in a decade". They were 2.8% year-on-year in December while imports tumbled a disastrous 21.3%. This will widen the trade gap and make it even more likely that some of the new Democrats in Washington will push for unwise trade actions against China, further deepening the spiral. Let's hope not and that steadier heads among the Obamistas prevail.

My room at the Fraser Suites looks out over the amazing building pictured here which is, I gather, the Nanjing Olympic Centre.

Swing back to mega events?

Happy New Year. What a lazy blogger I've been. Ah well. I am, however, intrigued enough by the suggestion that Apple will abandon Macworld in favour of CES to sharpen the iGooseQuill and share a few thoughts (thanks by the way to Colin Crawford for pointing to this piece via his Facebook status).

Received wisdom since the dotcom crash and the demise of Comdex has been that technology events are fragmenting and becoming more focused and specialised. Apple's shunning of Comdex, CES and other similar shows for the single brand Macworld has been offered frequently (by me amongst many others) as the best example of this key trend. We wondered when it might roll around the world and hit big events elsewhere, most notably CeBIT in Hannover.

Is this something to do with the economic downturn driving people back to big fairs or more a feature of Apple's repositioning itself as a consumer products company?

500 days to Shanghai World EXPO

More on the Shanghai World Expo in this piece from CCTV via YouTube. Following our piece on the missing US presence, you can get a sense of the scale of what the Chinese are building in Shanghai.

No show US in Shanghai?

The Shanghaiist blog is a good place to keep up-to-date with what's happening up there on the east China coast. There's not usually too much, though, directly related to our business interests. Today, however, there's a very interesting post about the likely absence of the United States from the 2010 World Expo.

It links to a site dedicated to launching a US pavilion. The basic line is:

Beginning on May 1, 2010, and continuing for six months, the nations of the world will gather in Shanghai to participate in what is forecast to be the largest, most heavily attended Worlds Fair in history. Incredibly, without immediate and decisive action on the part of America’s leaders in commerce and in government, the United States of America will be glaringly absent from this global celebration.

The result would be an insult to the Chinese government, global humiliation for the American people, and a serious blow to U.S. commercial prospects in the vast Chinese and other regional markets. The repercussions could reverberate for decades. We don’t want this to happen!

According to the Shanghaiist, this is due a diplomatic snit in the early 1990s when Congress passed legislation forbidding government funding of world fair pavilions. It says the US subsequently withdrew from the Bureau Internationale d'Expositions. Who knew?

I hope it sounds better in Chinese...

"King of trade" or something like that....but I do have to say, Ali Wang Wang, the IM tool from Alibaba's subsidiary Alisoft sounds awfully silly in English.

It definitely trumps Alimama which was hogging the limelight at the top of the Ali-silly name league table until I came across this one.

Continental to fly on pond scum

This isn't too much to do with business media other than the fact that everybody I know in the industry in Asia travels like demons and we all have carbon footprints that would make a yeti look dainty. There is increasing discussion, particularly within the events industry, about how we can address the challenges to business travel posed by the twin threats of economic downturn and increased environmental concerns.

So, I was intrigued by this piece on the Economist's Gulliver blog about alternative fuels. After Richard Branson's efforts to fly a 747 on old chip fat (actually, a blend of coconut and babassu oil and jet fuel), Air New Zealand is next into the fray with a plane using some jatropha oil for one of its three engines. But, what really caught my eye was the news of Continental's plans to fly a 737 on fuel derived from pond scum (plus jatropha oil and jet fuel).

I trust that the marketers and scientists will come up with grander and more palatable names for it, but I think that Pond Scum Air could have a future as Greenpeace's airline of choice. How about it as offficial airline for your next event?

A wondeful time for start-ups

"What's he smoking?", you may ask, but the suggestion isn't as mad as it may sound. Yes, markets are down and yes people are nervous. But, large companies are pulling back behind the pallisades and there are some benefits to getting new businesses into the market today.

I was talking about this with a former colleague over lunch today. She is upbeat. And, when I came back to the office, I saw this interesting post at TechNation Australia. Blogger Mike Watkins highlights five reasons that this is a good time for start-ups:

1. The talent pool is suddenly offering up a whole lot more choice to new businesses at much lower costs.
2. There's less competition.
3. Recession is the "fit farm" for new businesses - if you come out of the back end of this intact, you'll be in fighting form to benefit from the upturn which, as spring follows winter, will indeed come in due course, prophets of doom notwithstanding.
4. What Watkins calls "real VCs": if somebody puts money into your business today, (a) you're damned lucky and (b) you know that they have to be really serious. The days of the 22 year old MBA deal flippers are over. Thank goodness.
5. History - some of the world's great companies got their start in tough times. He cites Apple and Microsoft. A review of a book I was just looking at pointed out that Warren Buffet's father founded a brokerage in 1931.

So, there you have it: if you have ***** of steel, this may be the time to get your new business going. And you may be in luck. Your current employer may be getting ready to make this possible with a pink slip for Christmas.

How much longer for CMP Asia?

Like every business media company, they have their hands full right now with slowing markets, Indian terrorism, Thai politics, etc. etc. and it's hard to imagine the team at CMP Asia are too focused on corporate branding. However, as we did back in July, we do wonder how much longer parent company United Business Media will hang on to the CMP Asia identity.

At the FIPP/ABM B2B conference in New York in September, CEO David Levin told me that he didn't anticipate any immediate need for the Asian business to follow its US and European counterparts which had been restructured into what he described as "tiger" and "lion" businesses, the optimum size for each of which was, he said, $70 - 100m, about half the size of CMP Asia. Surely, an Asian dragon structure is the logical conclusion of all this.

I remain unconvinced by denials that this is being considered, particularly in light of today's news that the Commonwealth Business Media brand is also to fade into a UBM corporate identity. It'll be a bit harder to come up with a small number of logical market groups for Asia: jewellery and the rest? China and the rest? Jewellery, furniture, and the rest, etc. etc. But I'd be willing to bet a modest bet (take me on for a Blackberry Bold anybody?) that there will have been news on this before the middle of '09.

P.S. CMP Asia senior management are excluded from taking me up on my bet because i) you already have Blackberry Bolds and ii) you have an unfair advantage over me in having an inside track on this information!

Guaranteed success

You have to admire the savvy of those corporate types in these tough times. One sure way to guarantee success is to set yourself a target that has already been achieved.

So, when Google starts waffling about its ambitions for Hong Kong and says it "is committed to become a local product to turn Hong Kong into a large export-oriented platform for online marketers". Hmmm. I guess Global Sources, Alibaba.com, HKTDC and Tradeeasy have all been asleep at the wheel over the past decade then. Thank goodness for the cavalry in their nice, colourful Google hats coming to save us all.