Pressure from exhibitors has forced drupa to drop its controversial move to switch its cycle to three years and move back to four, taking the heat off local shows PacPrint and  PrintEx.

At the beginning of last year the giant trade expo in Dusseldorf announced its next event would be in 2019, in a move that was widely perceived as aiming to kill off Ipex, which was already on the floor, and hoover up the marketing dollars that would have gone there.

However some of the major exhibitors, possibly most of them, were never happy with the three year cycle which meant they would be effectively adding 25 per cent to their already enormous drupa costs. Floor space cost alone at drupa is €780 per square metre, per day.

At this year’s event Jeff Jacobson, president of the Xerox graphic division, which is a top ten exhibitor at drupa, openly stated his opposition to the three year show at the Xerox press conference.

Now halfway through the event, which has so far seen some 200,000 printers come into the Messe Centre, the drupa organiser is saying it is moving back to four years, with the next event slated for Tuesday June 23 to Friday July 3 2020. Duration is the same as this time at eleven days, down from the 14 days it used to run for.

[Related: All the news from drupa 2016]

Werner Dornscheidt, president & CEO of Messe Düsseldorf, says, “Representatives of the exhibitor community want to be at drupa in the future. Therefore in the interest of our customers and international markets, drupa will stick to its four-year cycle.”

For the organisers of Aussie shows PacPrint and PrintEx the news comes as a huge relief, as they were battling to work out how to fit in the shows around a three year drupa, and were toying with the idea of dropping PrintEx and running PacPrint on a three year cycle and alternating between Melbourne and Sydney.

The future of trade shows around the world is unclear. Plenty of shows have not got off the ground since the GFC, and even drupa, which is used to calling the shots, is now being dictated by its customers.

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