If the length of the queues at the entrances is any indication, this year’s “JEC World”, the world’s leading trade fair for the composites industry, could be a crowd puller:

Crowds jostled at the gates to the exhibition centre in Paris Nord Villepinte. JEC opened its doors at nine o’clock to the minute on 25 April 2023. Until 27 April, interested parties can find out about the state of affairs in and innovations from the composites industry.

Organiser JEC Group (Paris, France; www.jeccomposites.com) puts this year’s expected number of visitors at 33,000 to 36,000, but this is probably rather due to commercial caution and discreet understatement. If the forecasts come true by the end of the week, it would be considerably more than the 32,000 visitors of last year’s JEC World 2022, which had been postponed from March to May.

Despite this, visitor numbers still would not reach the level from pre-pandemic times, as when the fair had attracted around 43,000 interested visitors to the French capital in 2019.

A first tour of the JEC World 2023 shows: There are noticeably fewer visitors in the exhibition halls from Asia – and particularly from China. And of course, most of the exhibitors and visitors from Russia are also missing. Otherwise, the exhibitor situation has hardly changed at all: Although no reliable figures were available on the first day of the trade fair, there are expected to be around 1,200 companies presenting their products and services, just as in 2022 (2019: 1,300).

In any case, the two halls at the Villepinte exhibition centre are well-filled – any gaps would be hard to spot. Surprisingly extensive country pavilions put a spotlight on the market presence of the US and UK, for example.