Cebit - an embarrassment

I have participated in all Cebit trade fairs as an exhibitor. Already at the solution of Cebit from Hannover Messe Industrie in 1986, I was represented with my own booth of the then still very small IDS Scheer.

For me, the increasing size of the exhibition stand was always a sign of our growth story. With the IPO in 1999, we had then also clearly set a sign for our increasing internationalization.

When I became president of the industry association Bitkom in 2007, I automatically became a member of the supervisory board of Deutsche Messe AG and thus also had an internal insight into the design of Cebit.

Politics dominated the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Messe AG. The company is shared equally by the City of Hannover and the State of Lower Saxony, and the chairmanship of the Supervisory Board alternates between Lower Saxony's Minister of Economic Affairs and the Lord Mayor of Hannover.

At the meetings, the political representatives were seated at the u-shaped conference table at the front, while the external members of the Supervisory Board and the representatives of the workforce were seated at the two side wings. The Executive Board sat at the lower end of the table.

For me, this was indicative of the company's (lack of) entrepreneurial strength and lack of expertise.

Another factor influencing Cebit was the so-called trade fair committee, on which the major exhibitors were represented. This was dominated by the exclusively sales-oriented representatives of the large foreign IT companies.

For them, short-term business was more important than the heart and soul of supporting a globally leading trade show at the German location. In my view, the reasons for the Cebit's decline from a maximum of 850,000 to 150,000 visitors are obvious.

There were also early signs of Cebit's infirmity in terms of content. The trade show was losing one theme after another. Telecommunications moved to Barcelona, consumer electronics to Las Vegas, the Funkausstellung scored in Berlin and the emerging games scene established itself at Gamescom in Cologne, to name just a few examples.

Unfortunately, Germany plays only a minor role as a supplier on the IT market. We may have invented the computer with Konrad Zuse, but we no longer manufacture any.

But it would have been all the more important to support the location as a motivation for an independent German IT industry, to be more than just a spectator and referee of developments.

In a background discussion with the media in 2007, as Bitkom president, I had already pointed out that we needed to "pull the ripcord" on Cebit. But it was probably already too late.

Several attempts were made to introduce small cosmetic changes at Cebit, but a major U-turn to win back the lost territories did not come. The last attempt, in 2018, to give Cebit a completely new concept also came too late.

What have we lost now? We have lost a platform where providers and users found each other for strategic discussions. We have publicly abandoned ourselves to the world as a major player in the field of digitization.

Cebit was also a meeting place between politics and business. The German Chancellor, federal ministers and minister presidents of the federal states sought out discussions. I must say, however, that the Saarland minister presidents, regardless of their party affiliation, each had to be particularly motivated to make the trip to Hanover. I regretted this, because Saarland wanted to distinguish itself as an IT state at the same time.

Cebit has now returned to its beginning. It is being reintegrated into Hannover Messe Industrie, from which it once emancipated itself with great charisma.

This can be well justified by the fact that the digitization of industry is particularly important for Germany. Many industrial companies are also developing into software companies. Nevertheless, a major downer remains.