'Breakfast at bedtime’ is not saving the planet!
10 December 2007
We have an excellent contribution from Anand Sethi about how we gallop around the globe in cavalier fashion without a second thought to the environmental impact we are having. In light of this I have abandoned my original plans to talk about IP protection and have picked up on his argument and taken it down a different path – irrespective of the damage we are doing, is travel as important as we think it is?
We have an editorial policy on EMTWorldWide – and that is that there is no policy. Some of you may have picked up, for example, that we have a difference in opinion about China’s place in the world order – our Asian correspondent tending to concentrate on the positives and our Indian correspondent highlighting in his last comment a few of the negatives. This is a good thing – while different and individual opinions are aired then I hope we are avoiding the more typical sanitised newsletter platform that marketeers load up with their corporate messages.
However, when Anand Sethi filed his column for this week’s newsletter there was no difference of opinion (with me, at least). It really is an excellent overview of a situation we find even easier to dismiss in our work lives that we do in our domestic ones, and I if you were going to honour me with your company until the end of my article, I would urge you take a quick detour to Anand’s article (Carbon costs of trade shows) before continuing.
Welcome back! Anand’s analysis of the situation implies an element of irresponsibility in our industry – and who could refute this. A somewhat weary Marketing manager told me recently that she had visited 28 exhibitions in 2007, and only a few them were in her American homeland. Even if the trade shows themselves are designed for a national, rather than international, audience, the stars of the show (the exhibitors) are the same. Sales and marketing managers often have to trip from one stage to the next and from one continent to another.
From an environmental perspective this is costly, and for all that in his analysis he deliberately took Productronica as the most extreme case (a show which attracts a big global audience as well as large and expensive exhibits), Anand’s figures are quite scary. If you regard it as the consequence of us gathering and talking to each other then it seems profligate in the extreme. Idle talk cost money, they used to say.
And yet exhibitions are a vital part of progress, business and relationship building. Maybe an answer, in part at least, lies in Anand’ s thoughts about virtual exhibitions. But I think another consideration might be the number of events – are they all really necessary?
The same applies to exhibitions as everything else. If something exists and makes money, someone else will launch a product or service that competes. On the plus side this drives up standards. Without this competition there would be stagnation, over-pricing, complacency.
However, this competition does bring its own set of problems, and in 2008 this will undoubtedly become an issue. In my own little backwater of the UK, we have a long established Nepcon event that takes place in the spring in Birmingham. 2008 will see the launch of a ‘new’ event, the National Electronics Week – or NEW, to be held in London in June. Now the UK, for all that we think of ourselves as a hugely important country, are no longer a ‘Tier One’ manufacturing site. And having two national exhibitions dedicated to electronics manufacturing is not sustainable long term. The danger is that both go ahead, both disappoint and then in 2009 we don’t have a focal point for our industry at all.
I believe that in America there are certain conflicts as both the IPC and SMTA increase their portfolio of events, and the most obvious case is in China where Shanghai will play host to Semicon/Productronica China and Nepcon Shanghai within a three week period! How many exhibitors can afford to exhibit at both and how many visitors will find time to attend them both? Not many of the former and none of the latter would be my guess.
And the issue of our carbon footprint is exacerbated in the case of the Chinese shows because sandwiched in between them is APEX in the USA. I’ve previously described the exhibition trail as a travelling circus and never has this been more apparent. Will the suppliers really go to China, on to the USA, back to China and then return to the place they inappropriately call home? Some will, they are the ones who crave breakfast at bedtime and a stiff drink in the morning.
But who is this really serving? Because I don’t think that suppliers, engineers, and certainly not the environment are winners in our current situation. Anand suggests the ‘virtual exhibition’. While I like this idea, I also like meeting people – it makes our working lives easier and more rewording if we get to know the people who we are dealing with. So I still think exhibitions have a role to play.
This role is fairly well defined already, but how the whole portfolio and timetable of events is organised is a different matter. If we are going to take our environmental concerns seriously then something needs to change. Surely if every leading player in the industry sat down with a wall-planner in front of them with all the exhibitions around the world filled in, it would be possible to create a schedule that was a bit easier on both the environment and the individuals.
And if there was a conflict in a region then why not have the courage of your convictions, either as an exhibitor or visitor, and only go to one and not both. Not only would that speed up the ‘Darwinian’ process of establishing which exhibition was the strongest, it would also allow us to walk a bit more lightly as we leave our carbon footprints around the world.
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