Vinexpo has no plans for China show

Vinexpo’s  CEO, Guillaume Deglise, has said he stands by his decision to cancel a planned Beijing show and there will be no Chinese fair in the near future.

Speaking to trade and media at a press conference in Hong Kong, Deglise said he thought it was a “good decision” to cancel the Beijing fair given the slowdown in China at the time, which continued through 2014.

He added there was “no immediate plan” to create a new show for China although one may come at a later date.

For now he said he wanted to make the Hong Kong show “bigger and stronger” and there are plans to build on the successful Vinexpo Nippon which took place for the first time last year and is set to return in 2016.

Speaking to the drinks business, Deglise said dates for the Tokyo show were still being set but that he was “very happy” with how the show had gone and he wished to grow the show and bring in more visitors.

Having said at the beginning of the conference that he was well aware Vinexpo was “not alone anymore” in setting up new shows abroad, he admitted to db that “we must be cautious about what we do. We can’t just create new shows.”

He added that the focus for now would be on the three existing fairs which would offer challenges enough.

With the number of trade shows increasing, Deglise said there was “no choice but to modernise and find new ideas” to keep Vinexpo relevant and entice exhibitors and visitors back every year.

A number of changes and improvements have been announced for this year’s show in Bordeaux and Deglise said that those that proved successful would be applied to the other two fairs as well.

Innovations can go both ways of course and he pointed out that one of the new additions to the Bordeaux show was the “Spiritual” bar, in partnership with The Spirits Business, which had debuted at the Hong Kong show last year.

“Spiritual showed we tried something in Hong Kong and applied it to Bordeaux so it can be the other way round.”