“This year we had around 380 exhibitors on the show floor here at the Tokyo Big Sight exhibition centre, but next year we are aiming to attract around 700 exhibitors to the show floor,” said Hajimi Suzuki, director of sales and marketing for Reed Exhibitions Japan.
Much of this growth is expected to come from the fact that competitor exhibition Cite Japan will not be held on account of the fact that it is a bi-annual event and will not be staged again until May 2015.
Cosme Tech is already one of the biggest shows in the world
However, even with this taken into consideration the fact that this year’s event attracted more than 20,000 visitors and 3,000 conference delegates is still a major achievement, particularly as this year was only the fourth year that the event has been held, and the second since it was combined with Cosme Tokyo.
“We would also like to see more visitors and exhibitors coming in from the rest of the Asia Pacific region and worldwide next year, to make this in to a truly international cosmetic industry event,” said Suzuki.
“Currently around 5 percent of our visitors to this event are from outside of Japan, so next year we would like to see that figure increased significantly as we grow the size of the event, putting it on the map of cosmetic industry professionals worldwide.”
Korea Pavillion brings an international splash
This year there was a significant number of international exhibitors on the show floor, with the Korea Pavillion commanding one of the biggest areas, with more than 30 companies showcasing the latest innovations and product launches targeted at both the Japan market and internationally.
However, beyond the Korea Pavilion, it was noticeable that there were fewer companies from other parts of the Asia Pacific region, although there were booths representing Australia and New Zealand, India, Malaysia, China, Taiwan and Thailand.
Indeed, it will be interesting to see if there is more of a presence from other companies from different parts of Asia next year.
But besides this there were also companies from countries beyond the Asia Pacific region, including France, Italy, the USA, Palestine, Slovakia and Tanzania.