Fairs & Exhibitions (F&E), the organisers of this year's Gulf Pack show in Dubai, say they are expecting anything up to 12,000 visitors to the eighth “edition” of the Middle East's “largest packaging trade exhibition”, by far the largest audience to date.
Taking place from April 2-5, Gulf Pack 2007 is reportedly “attracting huge exhibitor interest”, and is expected to be a sell-out exhibitor-wise. Nevertheless Fairs & Exhibitions stresses there is still space available for companies available wanting to showcase their products, skills and expertise to a sizeable captive audience with considerable spending power.
Among the “300 plus” exhibitors signed up so far are Crown Emirates, Clear Pack MEA, Techno Middle East, Europack, Wolf Verpack and Termopak, while The World Packaging Association and the Asian Packaging Federation have provided “ongoing support”.
Promising this year's exhibition will be “the biggest and best yet”, F&E describe Gulf Pack enthusiastically as “a focussed business-to-business event that attracts a carefully targeted audience from the Gulf States, the wider Middle East, North & East Africa, Iran, India, Pakistan and the CIS countries which promotes the latest packaging trends to the largest trade audience anywhere in the Middle East”.
This year the biennial show is being held in the central and eastern halls of the Airport Expo Dubai centre alongside sister (commercial printing) show Gulf Print (taking place in a third hall). Such has been the interest, F&E regional director Dominic McGill explains, that the company has twice had to extend the available exhibition space in the past three months. He adds: “Anecdotal evidence suggests many packaging companies are now moving from Saudi Arabia to Dubai, while the region is a huge re-packing and re-exporting hub for big brand owners. These factors, combined with the region's increasing wealth and the resulting willingness of FMCG companies to set up here, mean the packaging market really is booming.”
To determine more accurately the extent of that growth, F&E commissioned independent research in tandem with the 2005 exhibition which revealed the UAE packaging market is “growing and at the core of a Gulf population totalling 37m people”. The research concluded that, while globally, the packaging market is growing by over 5% annually, growth in the Gulf is outpacing this. F&E's regional director Dominic McGill adds: “Some figures suggest packaging demand in the region is actually growing by anything between 20 and 30% a year.”
One area to have particularly benefited is beverage canning; as evidenced by Crown's continued expansion, with two new beverages can lines, one in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and one in Dubai. Crown is jointly developing a new end facility at the Dubai plant with regional partner AH Algosaibi and Bros with an annual production capacity of 1.5 billion 206 diameter beverage can ends.
Crown Bevcan Europe & Middle East marketing services manager Véronique Curulla says: “The future for cans (in the Gulf region) looks very positive. Cans are still the preferred pack for soft drinks. They have a number of positive attributes compared with other packaging; they chill quicker, can be transported and stored easily, resist the challenging weather conditions and are ideal for brand promotions.”
Alongside the exhibition, Gulf Pack 2007 will include a competition for the region's graphics and packaging design students, a “Gulf Label” zone “”harnessing the dramatic potential of the flexible packaging market and for those containers requiring pre-printed labels”, and seminars and workshops on key industry topics.
Neil Mainwaring, who joined F&E last year as sales director, says: “We have already attracted four times more exhibitors than we had in 2005, but there is still plenty of space left. While many of the visitors are traditionally from the Middle East, we are now seeing significant interest too from India, China and, increasingly, Europe. To date many European visitors have come from Spain, Italy and Turkey, but the show is an excellent chance for any European packaging or packaging-related businesses wanting to get in front of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African companies.”
