Official figures now put attendance at this year’s CITExpo at 6860 visitors and 311 exhibitors. With at least three main tyre exhibitions operating in China, not to mention a tyre recycling and retreading fair, other related rubber conferences, and other exhibitions in the Far East T&A asked if there will be a kind of consolidation in the show sector, with the more provincial exhibitions ceasing to be international scale events. Wilko Fong, director of CITExpo organisers, Reliable Exhibitions, shied away from commenting on the relative success of other exhibitions. Instead he preferred to quantify CITExpo’s success on its own merits: “CITExpo is now a mature show and while it is still growing now, after 6 years future growth is likely to level off and mature. The show is likely to become a more regular established show for tyres.”

CITExpo has a character of its own. There may not have been a full complement of the top 10 Chinese tyre manufacturers present at the 2008 show, but large scale manufacturers such as Triangle and Sibur took very significant sized stands. Sibur’s reasoning for its involvement with CITExpo was particularly telling. Bearing in mind the fact that, at present, the large Russian manufacturer generally exports economy-orientated truck tyres, China (home to probably the largest manufacturing base for this level of products in the world) is unlikely to be the end destination the company was aiming to reach. In stead Sibur invested in exhibiting at CITExpo in order to meet European buyers sent east to procure next year’s stocks.