In conversation with Mike Blackman

Founder & Managing Director, Integrated Systems Europe

- SNEHA RAMESH & PRAGASH VM

How did the Corona virus threat affect the show this year?

Corona virus has been a major theme of discussion here. As it all started, we started to prepare and firstly talk to our Chinese exhibitors. We had 258 Chinese exhibitors booked to exhibit at ISE 2020 and we started to contact them and reached almost all of them. About fifty of them had to cancel either because they were restricted from traveling or had their flights cancelled.

In addition to that, about twenty two companies cancelled because they were concerned about the health of their staff and customers. We respect their views. People come first and if that’s the decision, they need to stand by their policies and their feelings. We tried to help our Chinese customers in every way we can.

Secondly, there was a lot of nervousness from the attendees wondering if they could be here. The entire time, we took advice from the World Health Organisation, from the RVM (Dutch Health Organisation), the European centre for disease control and also the GGZ (Amsterdam Health Authorities). We constantly monitored their websites for advice and took that to move forward.

We put in additional sanitary facilities here like hand sanitisers all over the show. We also spoke to our exhibitors to find out the kind of sanitation devices they would have and in addition to that we had another fifty thousand small hand sanitisers that attendees could take with them.

This is your last year at Amsterdam. How has the show been and how has it changed over the years?