IFA closed in Berlin after five days with 240,000 visitors from 155 countries and more than 2,000 exhibitors. Leif Lindner, chief executive of IFA Management, said the show was “bigger and more international than ever before”.
The organisers report that artificial intelligence, mobility and robotics turned up in almost every show area rather than staying in a dedicated hall. Humanoid robots had their own runway. IFA Next, the innovation area, drew around 300 exhibitors from 24 countries, and the Innovation Awards took more than 530 submissions. Over 5,200 press and creators attended 47 press conferences.
Trade-show attendance figures are marketing, and we treat them as such. What is useful in them is the shape of the floor: when a feature appears on every stand in a category, it has stopped being a differentiator and become a line item in a specification. This year that happened to on-device AI in appliances and to open-ear audio.
For anyone building hardware, a show of this size is still the cheapest way to handle the parts of a project that email cannot. Component vendors bring application engineers rather than sales staff, competing products sit on neighbouring tables, and a fifteen-minute conversation at a stand often settles a question that has been circulating internally for a month.
It is also a useful reminder of where consumer electronics now gets its components. Almost everything on that floor runs on a microcontroller, a power stage and a radio bought from the same handful of suppliers that industrial equipment competes for, which is why a consumer show is a reasonable place to hear how the supply of ordinary parts is holding up.
Source: IFA Berlin