Coronavirus: Barcelona World Mobile Show Canceled

Text by: RFI Follow

Maintenance of events, postponement or cancellation? Hit hard by the defections of participants, the organizers of international fairs are questioning the attitude to adopt in the face of the crisis of the new coronavirus which is shaking up a flourishing sector. The Barcelona World Mobile Show (MWC), the sector's high mass, has been canceled.

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The organizers of the Mobile World Congress - the behemoth of international fairs, with nearly 110,000 visitors and 2,800 exhibiting companies - announced Wednesday, February 12, the cancellation of the fair scheduled from February 24 to 27 in Barcelona.

The organizing association GSMA indicates in a press release that it " has canceled the MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern relating to the epidemic of coronavirus, the worries about travel and other circumstances make the organization of this event impossible " .

Facebook , BT, Cisco, Nokia, Amazon, Sony, etc. The list of heavyweights having given up their arrival has grown in recent days, prompting the organizers to meet urgently on Wednesday.

This cancellation is an event in a sector that generates 1.3 million jobs and 137 billion euros in direct spending according to the UFI, an association of trade fair organizers, which lists 32,000 events of this kind each year in the world.

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