On the other hand, for some years now we have seen the birth of small and regional trade fairs in the plastics industry, with colorful but barely structured presentations of individual technologies and products. This is where distributors and sales representatives cavort, who, unlike manufacturers and integrators, usually only have a limited view of process and value chains or adjacent fields of technology.

I don't need events like that. Not as an editor and not as an engineer. As an engineer, I expect to be offered solutions at an industrial trade fair, not a collection of machines with price lists. This requires a certain size, but above all a concept. Showcasing complete or at least large parts of the value chain between the product idea and series production is the recipe for success. The Internet should have made costly trade fair visits superfluous by now. Far from it! With capital goods, often specifically tailored, it is still the look on the face of the (potential) partner that counts. At trade fairs, I find many such faces in short distances. If they are well done.

Martin Schrüfer, Editor-in-Chief of materialfluss:
In the intralogistics sector, trade fairs are still an indispensable part of companies' marketing activities. The question of whether they are still up to date cannot be answered so clearly. This is partly because intralogistics has long since become a central component of industry and trade and is no longer an annoying add-on. As a result, intralogistics experts are no longer just keen to demonstrate their own skills and show the competition what they are made of at their stand. They want to be where their customers already are.

For many years, the LogiMAT trade fair has been an excellent showcase for the industry, which has developed from a regional exhibition to a large-scale trade fair bursting at the seams with over 1,000 exhibitors. But now it depends on who offers SSI Schäfers and Jungheinrichs a link to the industry. A trade fair that operates as an industrial trade fair is predestined for this: In 2018, Hannover Messe tried to bring its intralogistics trade fair competitor CeMAT back on board - unfortunately not integrated, but rather on the fringes of the action. At the next edition in 2020, experts suspect that intralogistics will show that it has an interface function.

So if trade fair organizers find this knack, trade fairs will remain essential for the industry for a long time to come. Because let's not kid ourselves: In the age of the Internet, virtual reality and the like, interested parties can not only theoretically obtain information elsewhere than in an exhibition hall. However, if they see the big picture there and not just the pens and their warehouse shelf supplier, they will continue to come.