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Drives & Controls Show moves to Birmingham`s NEC in 2002

01 April, 2001

Drives & Controls Show moves to Birmingham`s NEC in 2002

The Drives & Controls exhibition and conference is finally moving to Birmingham`s National Exhibition Centre next year. After years of refusing our show entry for fear that it would harm existing exhibitions, the NEC has finally agreed to allow us in. The show will run from 28 to 30 May 2002, in Halls 6 and 20.

The announcement was made last month during the 2001 show, held at London`s new ExCeL exhibition centre. We had little option but to use the London venue this year because we had outgrown the sportshall in Telford where the show had been held for the past six years.

In any case, the Telford venue is being refurbished and, with the NEC not being available, we decided to move to ExCeL - the only other suitable UK venue large enough to accommodate the show.

In the event, the London venue did not attract the numbers of exhibitors or visitors that we had hoped for, although those who did make the journey were impressed with the venue and most exhibitors were happy with the quality of the enquiries they received.

Phoenix Contact, for example, reports that it had its best-ever Drives show, making 200 new contacts with potential customers from all over the world.

Around half of the visitors at ExCeL came from London and the South-East. These visitors would probably not have made the journey to Telford, or even to the NEC. Exhibitors reported meeting a different group of people from those they had previously encountered in Telford.

Exhibitors who supported the show at ExCeL will be given first choice of stand location at the NEC. Many potential exhibitors have welcomed the fact that the new timing places the show after the Hanover Fair, making it an ideal platform for showing newly-launched products to a UK audience for the first time. There have been some worries that the end-of-May dates would clash with a Bank Holiday but, for 2002, the holidays have been moved to allow for the Queen`s jubilee celebrations.




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