According to a survey conducted by the German Association for Information Management, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM) the conclusion drawn by exhibitors after the end of the CeBIT show is very positive. The show has shown that private and business customers alike are willing to spend money on digital products.
For this reason the BITKOM has also changed its growth forecast for this line of business. Experts now expect a plus of 2.0% in 2007. Turnover in information technology, telecommunications and digital consumer electronics is forecast to rise to 149.1 billion Euros. Growth driver is the IT sector which is expected to grow by 3.5%.
The number of people visiting this year´s BITKOM Mittelstandsforum (Forum for small and medium-sized entities) in hall 5 increased by thirty percent. With particular interest on the part of visitors met issues such as wide band technology, mobile communication and IT security. Other focal points of the CeBIT 2007 were telematics and navigation as well as systems providing digital services used by citizens when dealing with public institutions. Many professional visitors were interested in Radio Frequency Identification RFID – the corresponding BITKOM forum was visited by about 3.000 people.
According to Harald Stöber, who is a BITKOM representative, the exhibition organizers correctly identified the main innovations in the sector and set the right priorities. Thus, for the first time in many years the CeBIT was visited by an increasing number of people. Almost one quarter of the 480.000 visitors came from abroad. »The CeBIT has been confirmed as on of the world´s leading trade fairs», says Mr. Stöber. This fact became particularly obvious on the occasion of the German-Russion IT summit which was attended by almost 500 people and opened by the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs, Mr. Michael Glos, and the Russian deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Sergey Naryshkin.
In the opinion of the BITKOM the most important topic on the CeBIT 2008 will be convergence which means that technologies and markets will increasingly growth together. In addition, quite a lot of interest is said to go to the public sector. 