The Visual Impact show held in Sydney last week has been hailed a resounding success, with more exhibitors than ever before and an increase of nearly 10% on visitor numbers over previous years, says Peter Harper, General Manager – Trade Shows & Publications for the show’s organisers, Visual Connections.
“Initial numbers for the show are looking very pleasing with excellent attendances, particularly on the Thursday and Friday of last week,” Harper reports. “Most were locals, with some 80% of visitors from Sydney and the surrounding region, with the majority of the remainder from NSW regional centres and interstate.
“Importantly for the record number of exhibitors, more than half the attendees to the Sydney show were owners, CEOs, MDs or Directors of their companies, proving that Visual Impact is a true ‘decision makers’ show,” he added.
Harper says the success of Visual Impact Sydney has once again underscored the importance of this more focused show for his organisation’s members and the wider market, although he says that lower than anticipated Saturday attendance has confirmed Visual Connections’ inclination to keep future shows to weekdays.
“There has been a trend away from weekend attendances for a while now, and this Sydney show was no exception with record attendances on Thursday and Friday, but numbers down quite a bit on the Saturday, so we’ll canvas that with our members with a view to perhaps keeping future shows to weekdays only,” he reports.
Visitor feedback is currently being evaluated, and formal exhibitor and visitor surveys will also be conducted in the coming days, to ensure that future shows continue to reflect the changing needs of this dynamic market – meanwhile, however, Harper says all the indicators are that Sydney was an enormous success.
“We’re very pleased, and are now focusing on a really positive 2017 program, which will be particularly exciting with Visual Impact Melbourne co-locating with the PacPrint 17 at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre from 23-26 May, followed by Visual Impact Sydney, our first at the new ICC Darling Harbour, from October 11-13.”
The Visual Impact shows are primarily and formerly a generic sign show which includes the wide format printing sector but due to the relatively recent merger with GAMAA (Graphic Art Merchants Association of Australia), the organisers are attempting to attract exhibitors that would normally focus on the offset printing market, hence the addition of the likes of Curries with their mobile showroom. It will be interesting to see how this develops with future shows. PacPrint and Printex are of course the natural shows for this industry sector.
This year's Visual Impact Sydney show also included the POPAI exhibition which attracted several of the big display companies both as exhibitors and visitors. One of the Exhibitors (Megara) was delighted with their positioning midway between the POPAI exhibits and the Visual Impact show and Ian Sanderson, the MD was hopeful of some major orders for their locally made packaging and print media coming from the POPAI visitors in particular.
Also noticeable at this year's show was the significant increase in Chinese exhibitors. Supposedly proving that these Chinese companies are recognising that Australia is becoming an important market for them. These companies were mainly distributing LED lighting, print media and inks. Some of these companies have local representation whilst others are exclusively based in China.
Several machinery launches were made at the show with a couple of them being world firsts (the OKI Data ColorPainter E64S being an example). Several machines on show were older machines BUT are modular, meaning that they can be upgraded to new models, so looks could be deceptive when seeing what looked like an older machine on show - they may appear old but the reality is that they have increased performance, additional functionality and improved quality of output.
An angle that machinery vendors have been adopting for a while now is to show off the applications and markets that can be opened up with their products in addition to the machinery - HP have this down to fine art with several walls within their exhibit being allocated to examples of output but Roland DG, Graphic Art Mart, Mimaki Australia and Pozitive were also keen to show off some of the more unusual applications that their machines can tackle - the 3D Moire effect of the swissQprint machine on the Pozitive stand is very impressive and Phil Trumble of Pozitive described how easy it is to achieve.
Perhaps the most amazing output at the show was almost science fictional, at least to this writer. Mimaki in Japan have developed a 3D machine that can mould and print simultaneously with a couple of outstanding examples available on the Mimaki booth. Brad Creighton, National Marketing Manager was frustrated in that he was told to show off the examples but he could not or was not allowed to answer the many question on availability, price, size of output, etc., etc. All he could say is that they expected availability at some stage during 2017, which could be anywhere between four months and sixteen months away.
Whilst on the subject of 3D, Photo Electronic Services (PES) had an excellent example of the output possibilities from the Massivit 1800 machine. A large T-Rex head, created with the Massivit 1800 was attracting a lot of attention. See our video and previous articles on this product. With one machine already installed with another in the next couple of weeks as well as more local orders having been signed. One has to wonder how big our market is for these machines. Massivit apparently signed up over 20 orders worldwide from the drupa show
