Looking Back; Aquatech 2006; Small delegation, big results

Rotterdam: 18 October 2006

Only two participants from the Export Development Programme for Pipe and Process Equipment exhibited with CBI during the Aquatech exhibition in Amsterdam, a small delegation indeed. But no delegation to be ‘snubbed at’.

Around 300 people visited the CBI stand. This is an increase of over 20% compared to the last exhibition in 2004. Remarkable taking into account that the total number of visitors to the Aquatech exhibition only rose by 4% compared to the previous exhibition. Even more remarkable considering that during the previous exhibition CBI exhibited with 7 participants instead of only 2 this year.

Jan Nijeboer and Peter van der Sman of the CBI team feel that ‘smart promotion’ is the secret of this success. An extensive, but cost efficient mix of promotion tools were used to draw visitors to the CBI stand. A much targeted phone campaign was executed. Targeted to those companies who are likely to have an interest in the products promoted. These products consist of centrifugal pumps, malleable iron fittings and water handling pumps. A mailing campaign with the same target was executed as well.
At the same time the participants executed, under guidance of the CBI team, their own editorial campaign, attempting to get their message published. Their message of course being; “Visit my booth during the exhibition”.

It is this last element that is often a complete new promotion tool for our participants. Getting an article in a specialized engineering magazine is the best advertising you can wish for. Let us start with the obvious advantage everybody can think of. It is for free. No matter how interesting this may be, this is not the main advantage. The main advantage is that the specialized target audience will not recognize it as an advertisement. They will consider it a news article. Apparently this is such an important notice that their specialized engineering magazine finds it necessary to inform them about it. The chance that the reader will put a visit to the booth of our participant dramatically increases.
The fact that to most manufacturers in developing countries this is completely new and the fact that it is such an important promotion tool made the CBI team decide to give this such a high priority.

The Aquatech website itself was used to its full extent; press releases were published on the CBI Outsourcing activities, but also on the presence of the participants. E-mail signatures and announcements on various websites complete the promotion mix.
According to Jan Nijeboer (Commercial Manager of KommaNet Industrial Marketing Consultants and the CBI stand manager during Aquatech 2006) this is also ‘an important message’ we give to our participants. ‘Companies in our programme do not normally have huge promotion budgets. We did not have that either for promoting our Aquatech presence. Yet we really made a mark. If you do not have money, be clever !!’.

Not just in terms of visitors the results of this exhibition were ‘big’.
Khanna Malleables, first time participant and producer of malleable iron fittings expects to ‘cash in’ 350.000 USD in trial orders as a result of Aquatech 2006. And already they plan to come back to Europe to visit the companies of the most promising contacts.

APE Pumps is already experienced in the European field. Their centrifugal pumps attract fewer visitors, but that is only due to the nature of the product. Their business related to Aquatech may easily run into the millions of euros. This business is a combination of trial orders and of repeat orders that were either negotiated or sealed during the exhibition.

For the first time a local consultant joined the CBI team at Aquatech. Jay Srinivasan (Director of Industrial sourcing agency Unique Source Point and the local CBI consultant in Coimbatore) promoted three manufacturers of water handling pumps from the city of Coimbatore. He is from the same city and knows the companies inside out. Although the companies were not present themselves, visitors were very interested. Many brochures and CDs were taken. Visitors were especially interested when they heard that these companies had successfully passed a thorough CBI Export audit.

The interest of the visitors went so far, that already visits to and by European partners are taking place at this moment. Adding more results to the already big results of Aquatech 2006. It is more than likely that the three companies will be present in 2008 when the next Aquatech exhibition is taking place.

Aquatech showed a break in the trend of lower numbers of visitors to industrial exhibitions and subsequently to the CBI stand. The good news is that the quality of the visitors is judged very high by both the CBI team as well as the participants. First impressions show that the number of importers and traders is increasing. A good development for CBI, since we can often offer them cheaper suppliers offering the same quality.

From Eastern Europe and even from Asian countries a large number of public authorities visited the CBI stand. They are searching for suppliers for their, often large, project in public waterworks and face huge investments in waste water projects.
CBI did not mean to attract many visitors from the Middle East during the exhibition. That did however not stop visitors from the Middle East from visiting in great numbers.
They form a very good potential for our participants.

The title of this article already says it all. It was a small delegation achieving big results. From 30 September until 3 October 2008 we will however not have a small delegation. Instead of 2 this year, we already count 10 likely CBI exhibitors. Two years is of course too long. So just contact us and we will let you know which of those companies is most interesting for you:

CBI
Att: Peter van der Sman / Jan Nijeboer
P.O. Box 30009
3001 DA Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Tel. +31 10 201 34 34
Fax +31 10 411 40 81E-mail: cbi@cbi.nl