Around 30% of visitors to national and international trade fairs in Germany came from abroad in 2018. This once again matched the excellent result of last year. Around 640,000 of the total of 2.9 million foreign visitors (22%) came from countries outside Europe. This clearly underlines the role of the trade fair country Germany as a worldwide leading site for top international trade fairs according to calculation of AUMA – Association of the German Trade Fair Industry. Compared to the respective previous events of the 2018 exhibitions, the number of foreign visitors grew by more than 3%. Any losses because of growing trade conflicts could not be noticed yet.
Nearly 400,000 interested parties travelled from Asia to Germany to gather knowledge at trade fairs and prepare for procurement transactions, as well as over 160,000 people from North and South America. The share from South-East-Central Asia exceeded 10% for the first time, while for the Near and Middle East the figure was 2.9%, for North America 3.1% and for Latin America 2.6%. The most significant country in Europe in terms of visitors was the Netherlands, with 240,000 interested parties, ahead of other EU countries and Switzerland.
The most important countries from the overseas regions were as follows: East Asia: China (110,000), Near/Middle East: Israel (30,000), North America: USA (70,000), Latin America: Brazil (21,000) and Africa: Egypt and South Africa (around 13,000 each).
Source: AUMA
