Country focus
15
minutes
with:
Ugo Ravanelli, CEO of Italian
Exhibition Group
What are your top three pieces of
exhibition business?
We could respond Vicenzaoro, SIGEP
and stand fitting, but that would be
restrictive, because our business is
composite, interconnected and the
result of a unitary strategy.
Organising expos and conferences
and enriching our core business
with collateral ones is not sufficient
for us: we want to be the key players
of markets’ development. We’d
therefore say, as far as the future is
concerned, the gold sector, the food
sector and the service sector.
What is your current biggest
challenge?
Definitely internationality. When
talking about expos abroad, joint
participations, events, interchanges
are often referred to.
IEG is internationally structured
with actual companies, other world-
level expo organisers, such as VNU
in China and Emerald in Las Vegas:
along with them, we’re developing
expos in the jewellery, tourism and
environment sectors.
In Dubai, we formed a company
with Dubai World Trade Center and
we have organised Vicenzaoro Dubai
for four years.
In the US, we have acquired one of
the country’s most important stand
fitting companies. For all exhibitors,
we’ve launched an exclusive online
platform for business match-making.
What percentage of your
exhibition business is organised by
yourselves?
95% of IEG’s expos are owned by the
Group and this is the main feature
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Issue 2 2019
that distinguishes us from the majority of other
expo centres. This is the basis of our success. Antonio Bruzzone, General
Manager of BolognaFiere
What are the main 3 trends on the Italian
exhibition market and what do you feel your
venue’s USP is compared to competitors?
Internationalisation, Digitalisation and
Sustainability. Sustainability is definitely IEG’s USP:
it has been at the heart of our strategies for 23 years. Your top pieces of exhibition
business over the last year?
The BolognaFiere Group’s calendar
includes 80 events in Italy and
abroad. If we were to rank in terms
of dimensions and number of
exhibitors I would include Cosmoprof
Worldwide Bologna, CERSAIE, EIMA
International. Among the smaller
events are the Bologna Children’s
Book Fair (1,300 exhibitors, of
whom 1,200 come from abroad),
MarcabyBolognaFiere, and SANA.
All are planned with multi-year
contracts, if not organised directly by
BolognaFiere.
Fiera Milano’s Director of
Communications Marina Tamagnini
Your top pieces of exhibition business?
Our strategic plan takes an holistic approach to
the value chain. To ensure we deliver sustainable
long-term growth, the focus is not on a limited
number of exhibitions. It goes beyond that. We are
strengthening our directly organised exhibitions by
reinvesting our profits and leveraging the unique
ecosystem in which our company HQ exists.
What is your biggest challenge?
With 80 exhibitions a year, we welcome 4.5m
visitors and more than 35,000 exhibitors from SMEs
to multinationals. Our challenge is to ensure that
every one of them finds the experience they are
looking for and that stepping into our shows means
growth for businesses and bridges to new markets.
What percentage of your exhibition business is
organised by yourselves?
We do both and that is our main asset. As organisers
of top ehibitions such as Host Milano, the leading
exhibition for hospitality, we are fully aware of
what our clients want, experiencing it ourselves on
a daily basis.
What are the main trends on the Italian
exhibition market and what is your venue’s USP?
It is a volatile world and, in the exhibitions world
more than in other sector, the capability of reading
the evolutions in the external environment and
how those can influence trends, sectors and future
development is key.
What makes Fiera Milano as a group a front-
runner with a lot of untapped potential is a mix
of ingredients: our venue, the ecosystem in which
we operate, the intrinsic capability of our country
to serve excellence in key sectors such as fashion,
lifestyle and food worldwide, and the courage to
work to embrace new developments within the
digitalisation sphere to make the experience in our
shows unique.
You current challenges?
In just 10 months we have completed
the first step in our development
plan for the exhibition centre that
will see an investment of €138m.
September 2018 saw the opening
of new pavilions 29-30. The first
large organisers to use them were
Confindustria Ceramica for CERSAIE
and FederUnacoma. A second stage
includes a large new pavilion.
Acquisitions last year include the
Health and Beauty Group and Gruppo
GiPLanet and integrating the new
platforms is an important challenge.
The next steps are to reinforce
some exhibition sectors abroad: the
PET sector could see us involved in
new markets, the publishing sector
that in 2018 saw us create two new
events: the New York Rights Fair and
the China Shanghai International
Children’s Book Fair.
What percentage of your business
do you organise yourselves?
A significant percentage. We were
the first Italian organiser to export
our own events and a third of our
revenues today are generated
overseas. Our Group has a company
dedicated to the Asian markets –
BF China – involved not only in
organising events but also in the
incoming visits of Asian exhibitors.
w w w.exhibitionworld.co.uk