GUANGZHOU, CHINA – The pace of growth may have slowed a bit, but the massive Chinaplas show just keeps rolling on. The four-day show's 114,000 attendees (excluding more than 40,000 exhibitor staff and media) represented an increase of nearly 4 percent over the 109,858 attendees from 140 countries that attended the April 2012 show in Shanghai.
The show's aisles swelled with more than 40,000 visitors on May 21, the event's second day, and thinned to about 10,800 on the final day, whose closing hour was extended to 5 pm from the previous mid-afternoon time. The visitor total fell a bit short of pre-show estimates of about 120,000. But still, Stanley Chu, chairman of the show's Hong Kong-based owner and organizer, Adsale Exhibitions Services Ltd., said he was extremely pleased with the outcome, noting numerous comments from exhibitors about the high quality of the attendees.
The international component of Chinaplas also continues to grow, with visitors from outside China increasing to 27 percent of the 2013 total, up from 25 percent at the previous Shanghai show.
As previously reported, in terms of exhibit space, the 220,000 square meters of gross space at this year's Guangzhou event was 22 percent larger than 180,000 square meters the last time it was held in that south China city, in 2011. It also represented a 4.7 percent increase over the previous year's 210,000 square meters (2.26 million square feet) in Shanghai.
Adsale said it counts attendees once for each day they attend.