I have an admission to make upfront: I have been guilty of hyperbole in the title of this article. When I lauded it as this year’s biggest expo, I meant in South Africa specifically . . . and focused on electronic engineering, design and manufacturing in particular . . . and big compared to the queue to register for e-tolls.
Yup, the country’s pool of electronic engineering talent is shrinking all right, and I fear the Internet is giving what few there still are even less reason to venture out into the real world than ever. Which all makes for an actually quite small expo in the big scheme of things.
I’ve started this article all wrong, because it sounds like I’m putting it down when in truth, as the title suggests, I thought it was absolutely spectacular! . . . sorry, hyperbole again. Bear with me as I try to explain.
This year’s biggest expo
The electronic engineering community gathered in Midrand on the 11th and 12th of March for the third, biennial Gauteng edition of National Electronics Week ASEC Expo South Africa. The exhibition once again attracted members of the industry in the Johannesburg and Pretoria areas (as well as some brave souls from further afield) to network with the country’s leading distributors and providers of electronic manufacturing and test equipment, components, accessories and services, who provided them with a window to the latest developments and technologies.
The overall presentation of the show was without fault and, almost without exception, it was clear that a lot of effort was put into the displays. Credit must go to the organisers and exhibiting companies for putting on a very good looking exhibition that was slickly and professionally run.
Several eager foreign companies even travelled from overseas to ensure that they had a presence at the show, some of which had their own stand space and others which were hosted by their local partners. Those companies’ long journeys, while appreciated, also serve to underline what a pity it is that several prominent South African companies that have had a large presence at past National Electronics Weeks chose not to support this year’s show.
Nobody reading this is under any illusions that times are tough for our industry right now, and we can all understand that budgets are tight. I make absolutely no judgement of those who didn’t exhibit, and I’m certainly not about to name them, but the talk amongst exhibitors and visitors alike suggests that their absence did not go unnoticed.
Business as usual
For those of you who didn’t go this year, the 2014 edition was . . . fairly typical, really. It was at Gallagher Estate instead of the usual Sandton Convention Centre. There were some stands with many, many things on display and some that were more minimalist. There was food that was edible and drinks that were wet. There was a smoker’s corner outside where all the best gossip could be traded.
Some exhibitors channelled the mystical allure of sweets to attract unsuspecting passers-by. Some used coffee. Dataweek even shamelessly went so far as to have a soft serve machine on its stand. There was a medical aid station where a very friendly nurse weighed me and then spent 15 minutes checking my vital signs and cataloguing my medical history, before concluding that it was indeed within the realm of mortal safety to supply me with a Panado to treat what had started out as a relatively minor headache, but grew progressively worse as the interrogation wore on.
But really, this exhibition was all about doing business, and there can be no better judges of how successful it was in this regard than the exhibitors themselves. So we asked them, and most of them kindly responded.
While nobody was blown away with the attendance figures (the organisers reported 888 visitors compared to 1168 at the previous Joburg edition) the general consensus was that the ‘quality’ of the visitors was good for the most part. Quality in this case does not reflect a perception of one’s personal worth or character, but rather whether the visitor in question resides satisfactorily within the target demographic to make it worth the exhibitor’s time talking to them. This high ‘quality’ rating is borne out by the organisers’ feedback indicating that 83% of attendees were in positions to either make final purchasing decisions, or at least recommend or influence them.
Attendance figures likely weren’t helped by the lousy weather in conjunction with the fact that people had to park across the road and walk a not insignificant distance to get into the venue.
Happenings and exhibitor feedback
The following is a selection of some of the promotions that took place on the show floor, and some of the feedback and highlights identified by exhibitors. My apologies and thanks go out to those who did send info and/or photos that are not included.
Concilium Technologies ran an oscilloscope trigger competition which highlighted the ease and speed of being able to set up a complex trigger on an intermittent signal using just one finger with the touch screen technology of the Agilent Technologies 4000X series scopes.
Two winners each received an Agilent handheld multimeter: 1st prize went to Paul Badenhorst from EOS who triggered on the glitch and measured the glitch parameters in 5,5 seconds; while 2nd prize went to Phillip Jacobs from Zitera who was very close at 5,76 seconds.
The product lines that attracted the most attention on Avnet Kopp’s stand were its LED offerings from Lumiled and Seoul Semiconductor, and LCD offerings from Crystal Clear Technology and Microtips. In its embedded application section, a demonstration of the Intel NUC running Windows Embedded 8 and a Flytech touch screen attracted attention, as did the Connectore i.MX53 from Digi International.
Johnny van Aardt, John Chapman and Tinus Stander won multimeters and current clamps from K Measure.
Mitch Cox and Amos de Lange were picked as the lucky winners of R1000 kalahari.com gift vouchers from Dataweek.
Techmet put a lot of effort into packing a vast array of equipment onto its stand, with operational machines including the new Mirae MR20 platform, a strong mid-range performer boasting very low placement costs per component. The company also established relationships with two new suppliers, namely Kwiktic and SMT Surclean. Techmet will be offering post-show specials on all equipment that was shown on its stand in the near future.
Deltronics held a draw from which David Langstone from Paramount Advanced Technologies walked away the winner of a year’s subscription to Altium’s Tasking compiler and an STM3221-G EVAL board.
Eric Verhulst, from Altreonic – a Belgian company providing software solutions for embedded development – said that, although they would have liked more qualified leads to follow up on, the interest that was shown was enough to convince the company to organise a South African seminar road trip in the near future.
Verdict
As I suspect has been the case with every exhibition ever held in any industry, I observed while supervising getting my hands dirty packing up the stuff from our stand after the show that there were exhibitors with smug smiles and congratulatory pats on the back while packing up their stands, others that looked suicidal, and the largest part of the population somewhere in the middle, in ‘just satisfied’ territory.
I’ve also learnt that positive feedback from someone on the day of a show can transform into despair (or vice versa) within a week, depending on how much immediate business has or hasn’t resulted from their investment of time and money.
For this reason, as one does, I have created an experimental methodology whereby, as I walk the show floor and do the meets and greets, I count the numbers of smiles, grins, frowns, scowls, fake interest, terror, blank looks and boredom (yawns don’t count – these shows are hard work, after all) that I see on the faces of exhibitors and visitors. I then insert these numbers into a series of complex formulas (patent pending) to reach a quantitative evaluation of the show’s success.
The bottom line for this year’s show: -31,61. Translated into human, that’s about 7 out of 10, which is pretty good. Taking into account what I observed during the time I was there, all the feedback from exhibitors, visitors, colleagues and organisers, the digestibility of the food and drink, and the thoroughness of the medical care, that would be my (admittedly subjective) verdict of this year’s show: pretty good.
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