Prior to lockdowns and social distancing becoming the theme of 2020, it was business as usual with business events taking place every week in the UAE. Post-enforced lockdown being lifted in Dubai in late May this year, AI Everything was the first event physical event to take place 16th July 2020 in the now post-Covid world.
Since then, a few small-scale physical events have taken place under the most stringent health and safety measures. Last week, I attended the Dubai Design Week exhibition at Dubai’s Design District, where a number of UK brands including Porta Romana, Julian Chichester, Tala and John Cullen were well represented.
From 6th to 10th December, GITEX is set to follow suit with a real live trade show and lead the tech world from the front with a special edition, co-locating with four additional events (GITEX Future Stars, Future Blockchain Summit, Marketing Mania and GISEC).
With Gulfood, the largest food & beverage exhibition in the region normally generating in excess of 100,000 visitors (pre-covid) still scheduled to take place physically in Dubai in late-February 2021, we’re hoping that this jumpstarts the return of large-scale physical trade shows & exhibitions in the UAE, particularly with promising news on the vaccine front starting to emerge.
We’d expect the organisers of other large-scale events (e.g Arab Health, The Big 5, Intersec) will be looking at and learning from the likes of GITEX and Gulfood for their own shows scheduled events later in 2021. And then of course there’s the biggest of them all, Expo 2020, due to start on October 1st 2021.
The BCB team will be present (socially distanced, masked and sanitised) at all of these events, and we will continue to report back on the latest trends, developments and opportunities that we spot for UK exporters to take advantage of.