This article appeared in the October 2009 edition of INNsight

CPhI – has it grown too big?

Congratulations to those of you who survived the CPhI exhibition in Madrid. After three days, I felt that I had at least walked a marathon, even if I did not run one.

Let’s look at the statistics – 7 halls with over 1,800 exhibitors means a very big exhibition. Out of these, there were no less than:

• 425 Chinese exhibitors
• 208 Indian stands
• 115 Italian companies
• 74 Spanish participants

and so on and so on.

For me, the whole exhibition seems to have grown too large now that CPhI, ICSE, P-MEC , BioPh have all been merged together with only the world Cup being left out. It seems like I am not the only one moaning about the size because the CPhI website shows an innovation for 2010:

“As part of its 20th anniversary, CPhI Worldwide 2010 will have a new zoned layout to give you higher visibility and to help promote your business and deliver your message to a worldwide audience.

Shaped by your feedback, we are introducing six dedicated zones for exhibitors.”

At last it seems that the organisers are beginning to share my reservations or else perhaps many others like me with sore feet and arms aching from carrying a brief case have also been complaining. Next year’s zones seem like an attempt to answer the problem. The zones will be:-

• APIs
• Custom Manufacturing
• Intermediates
• Fine Chemicals
• Excipients
• General

The bit that I liked in the organiser’s comments was the sentence “Visitors will benefit from more logical onsite navigation and from being able to spend more time talking and less time walking.” Wonderful! Perhaps they can also provide electric scooters for us all as well.

Nevertheless, despite my grumbling about the size, I still would not miss it, as it is a marvellous opportunity to meet and chat, stumble across people in the aisles and see what is going on. For exhibitors it is all this as well as a chance to show who can afford the biggest and flashiest stand.

Of course, there is also the antithesis of the flashy stand in the shape of those that look like a 1m² booth with a single unintelligible poster on the back wall. Add to this a person manning the stand who has a poor command of English and the result is the mental question of “why do they bother?”

Now this is not intended to disparage people who do not speak fluent English – my knowledge of Hindi and Mandarin Chinese is pretty poor – but rather to point out that English is the language of international commerce. Chinese will use it to communicate with Italians and Greeks will use it to speak to Germans, so an inability to communicate in the language can only be a handicap to exhibitors.

Given the way that manufacturing of both APIs and formulations appears to be moving away from Europe in an Easterly direction, it seems that many companies have already found a solution, but other exhibitors that want to be a part of this will have to smarten up their act.

And while I am grumbling, I must mention the lower quality of freebies that I was able to scrounge this year. One of the consolations of trudging around the monster exhibition is finding amusing and entertaining give-aways to scrounge for my children (that’s my excuse anyway) that take my mind off my aching feet. This year, I was not impressed. Am I just getting older, more cynical and harder to please, or is there a recession on?

Anyway next year, as Humphrey Bogart pointed out to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca “We’ll always have Paris”