For two years, the trade fair companies have been stuck in the greatest crisis of modern times.

And it doesn't look like they'll be able to fully recover from it.

Just a few days after the relaxation of the corona pandemic was announced, Russia attacked Ukraine.

The global dislocations caused by the invasion are shaking the industry's business foundation.

It is another mega-crisis alongside the pandemic and climate change that shows what the trade fair companies should have relied on a long time ago: their digitization.

It worked without it, says one head of the trade fair, the virtual world is developing so quickly that you would have had to be constantly updated, says another, the revenue opportunities are very limited, a third party tries to explain.

“In addition, the big exhibitors will not spend several 100,000 euros online.

They did that at trade fair stands without much hesitation.”

Purely digital events

In fact, the most important exhibitors are investing several 100,000 euros in virtual events without much hesitation.

But at the moment you are not doing it in cooperation with the trade fair companies.

Siemens, for example, is planning dozens of purely digital events a year even after the pandemic has flattened out.

It is said from there that the trade fair companies will not do anything soon, that they will think carefully about which trade fairs they will be present at in the future.

Indeed, one wonders what an industry with more than 4 billion euros in sales has been doing since 2019 before the pandemic.

So far, the trade fair companies see themselves primarily as observers when it comes to digitization.

They react instead of act.

Martin Paul Fritze, who researches the trade fair industry at the University of Cologne, speaks of an "industry that has been spoiled by demand for a long time and that is pushing ahead with an innovation backlog in digitization".

There are a few examples of first honorable and sometimes successful attempts to move popular trade fairs like Gamescom to the virtual - but when trade fair bosses in 2022 when asked about their digital strategy say: "We have now built a studio and hired a director", respond with references to the website, which has existed since 1995, or even confess that

Exhibitors and business customers will continue to attend trade fairs in the future.

But at the moment everything indicates that it will be much less than before the pandemic.

After a temporary post-corona euphoria, there will be around 30 percent overcapacity on the German exhibition grounds, predicts the economist Manfred Kirchgeorg.

If the trade fair companies don't want to shrink, they have to make modern infrastructure available.

At the moment, exhibitors keep reporting that they cannot set up their stands on site as planned, for example because the internet connection at the exhibition center is unstable.

What can be transferred to the virtual world?

The big exhibitors understood even before the trade fair companies what makes the digitization of the event business so complicated: Very little can be directly transferred from the physical to the virtual.

Digital trade fairs have to be rethought from the ground up.

Hardly any business customer is bothered by spending eight hours at a time in the halls of the Frankfurt Trade Fair.

But sitting in front of a screen for eight hours to follow a virtual event on the same topic - no one is ready for that.

In view of the difficulty of the task, it is not surprising that the trade fair companies now want to concentrate on the face-to-face trade fairs again, now that their core business can get going again.

But in doing so, they risk missing the turning point and losing the field of virtual events to internet companies.

In such a competitive struggle, they would not be without a chance.

Many important trade fairs have been held for decades, if not centuries.

Scientists like Martin Fritze from the University of Cologne call the visitor data that the trade fair companies have been able to collect over the years "incredible treasures".

Until now they are mostly still unused on the servers.

If they were managed professionally, they could offer trade fair companies a reliable source of income even in the digital age.

Siemens has already expressed its interest.