SNEHA RAMESH & PRAGASH VM
In conversation with
Mike Blackman
Founder & Managing Director,
Integrated Systems Europe
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
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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?
When we started the ISE show in 2004
in Geneva, we had only about 3500
attendees and moving to Amsterdam
was quite significant in giving us
the opportunity to access people
from all over Europe and beyond.