Exhibition Industry Posts Gains for 16 Consecutive Quarters

September 16, 2014

The Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) released Q2 data collected for the annual CEIR Index report, which was released September 11 at CEIR Predict Conference in Chicago. The results marked a modest year-on-year gain of 1.0 percent. All four metrics posted year-on-year gains with the strongest performance in real revenues, which rose 1.4 percent. The growth of the exhibition industry lagged behind GDP during the second quarter of 2014, a reversal of the previous two quarters.

“Overall, the second-quarter results show a meager gain of 1.0 percent; the underlying reasons for performance can be attributed to weak exhibition performance in the construction, business, education and non-profit exhibitions sectors” says CEIR’s economist Allen Shaw, Ph.D., chief economist for Global Economic Consulting Associates Inc.

The sectors leading in performance to date in 2014 are food, increasing 6.2 percent; discretional goods and services (cs), increasing 5.4 percent; and communications and information technology (IT), increasing 4.3 percent. Conversely, the education and non-profit (ED) sector declined by 3.5 percent, which is attributed to retrenchment of state and local government expenditures. The raw materials and science (RM) sector declined by 0.6 percent, even though fundamentals remained sound during the same period.

As an objective measure of the annual performance of the exhibition industry, the CEIR Index measures year-over-year changes in four key metrics to determine overall performance: net sf of exhibit space sold; professional attendance; number of exhibiting companies; and gross revenue.

www.ceir.org

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