Show & Sell: India’s exhibitions market set to fire up in 2023

Fears of an incoming Covid spurt apart, India’s exhibitions and conventions business is set to scale up in the new year, with new facilities and more competition on the anvil expected to fire up the Rs 1.5 lakh crore market.

January’s Auto Expo, which expects seven lakh visitors and is the biggest exhibition event held in India, will very much set the stage. The handicraft exporters consortium-owned India Expo Mart had created waves when it snatched the apex auto industry event away from its original base, the government-owned Pragati Maidan in the heart of the national capital, a few years ago. This year, it ups the ante with more facilities and features, including a 134-room deluxe hotel right on its grounds right in time for the showcase event.

“We are the latest, larger, bigger and better,” said Rakesh Kumar, chairman of the India Exposition Mart Limited (IEML) which owns the India Expo Mart in Greater Noida, a satellite township outside Delhi. Besides the metro connectivity to the rest of the national capital that the venue now boasts of, the hotel, Expo Inn Suites & Convention, is a further addition that IEML hopes will dispel the general feeling that the venue was too far away from the heart of the city.

And to add to the mix, the upcoming Noida International Airport in Jewar, set to open in 2024, is just a 15-minute drive from the Expo Mart grounds.

The exhibitions and meetings market is firing up, with India improving its ranking in the meetings, incentives, conferences & exhibitions (MICE) market from a dismal No.143 position back in 2016 to No.28 just before the pandemic struck.

Trade fair venue owners are themselves revving up — Pragati Maidan, owned by the India Trade Promotion Council, a wing of the ministry of commerce and industry, has been undergoing a massive renovation over the past four years — the many woes of the popular venue over the past five decades like traffic and crowd management could well be history after the infra reworking is complete. PM Modi’s much-touted G20 Summit is scheduled to be held at the refurbished venue come September.

While IEML itself is going in for a Rs 600 crore IPO next year and aims to set up new trade fair grounds in places like Jodhpur and Punjab, it will face competition on its home turf with the much-delayed convention centre project of GMR in New Delhi Aerocity gathering steam.

“Trade fair grounds build a huge ecosystem to provide local employment,” said Sudeep Sarcar, CEO of IEML. “We provide expertise, running processes, modern infrastructure and logistics which are the backbone of successful trade fairs.”

Hotels and even bigger banquet operators are also eyeing the possibility. While till now big hotel chains were content with hosting small and medium level events within their hotels, the strategy is changing. An example is the 50,000 sqft Taal Kutir Convention Centre, a standalone venture by the Taj hotel group which opened in Kolkata last December.

Considering that exhibitions and trade fairs contribute in total about 325 billion dollars to the global economy, it is indeed a lucrative market. Now India’s effort is two-pronged — to expand trade fairs beyond traditional locations like Delhi to other towns, while trying to lure global exhibitors to come to India.

The reason is simple. US cities and European countries like Germany remain the primary spots for major international trade fairs — even while a good chunk of the exhibitors are either from India and China or are companies that manufacture in these countries. With Indians spending an estimated 1.1 billion dollars in outbound MICE (or to travel abroad and exhibit in foreign trade fairs), the question is — why not save that money and make India itself a exhibitions and conventions destination? The global construction machinery showcase from Germany, BAUMA CONEXPO, exhibiting in India next month, it is hoped, will only be the first in this reverse flow.