Author:
Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD
Date
03/13/2020
PDF
COVID-19 has claimed another victim – on Friday, PCIM Europe 2020 was officially postponed.
The good news is that PCIM will be delayed (until July 28-30) instead of cancelled. And the decision was almost entirely out of the show organizers’ hands.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn recently called for a ban on public gatherings of more than 1,000 people (through April 19th), and the city of Nuremberg upped the ante by extending the ban to events with more than 500 participants for the Nuremberg city area.
So this was inevitable -- “Under these circumstances and with the statement by the Bavarian Minister of Economic Affairs, in which he assumes that no trade fair will be able to take place in Bavaria until mid-May 2020, a postponement is ultimately unavoidable and due to compelling reasons beyond our control,” claimed a rep for Mesago Messe Frankfurt GmbH, which runs PCIM Europe.
The coronavirus has already bested countless trade shows (including APEC and Hannover Messe, the latter of which was also delayed until July), not to mention Major League Baseball and the NBA, which are both on indefinite hold.
And with Minister Spahn labelling COVID-19 a “worldwide pandemic,” PCIM is yet another unfortunate casualty.
Still, we’re looking at postponement, not cancellation, and hopefully, the coronavirus will lose steam by the summer.
