Welcome to this edition of the ESA newsletter. I hope you enjoyed the European summer, whether that meant going on holiday to recharge your batteries or perhaps bingeing on the Olympics. Either way, I hope you are well and ready for the second half of the year.
Since the last publication, we have now had Achema, which many of us attended, and I had the great pleasure of meeting many of you there. Encouragingly for our industries, I am informed the Achema was a great success, with 63% international exhibitors and just under 50% international visitors, with over 106,000 visitors from 141 different countries (for comparison, in 2022 there were 70,000 visitors, in 2018 there were over 144,000 visitors), so there is still a long way to go before footfall approaches pre-Covid numbers even if there were fewer exhibitors this year; trade shows may never see the pre-Covid visitor numbers again, as the rapid progress of digitalisation and AI makes these types of events less attractive to the Gen Z population! That said, the halls that were relevant to our industry (mainly 8 and 9) were extremely busy and vibrant.
As you will have seen in the newsletter and in communication from Mark Neal, we have reverted back to a ‘special’ autumn board meeting where the division officials will also attend to discuss the various divisional plans. I know that several of the divisions will be holding their meetings at the same time, so I hope to see many of you in Düsseldorf on 25 and 26 September. I would like to take this opportunity to wish you well in these challenging times as our customers and our industries navigate the various tensions we see in many of our key markets and the difficult and complex journeys to a low carbon environment.
John Morton
Chairman of the ESA