UNIDO at Hannover Messe – five years of a successful partnership

UNIDO celebrates five years of a very successful partnership with the Hannover Messe and has launched a new brochure to highlight the aspects of this successful collaboration. Hannover Messe is the world’s leading industrial and technology fair and it serves as a global hub for industrial and technology transfer with 6,500 yearly exhibitors and more than 200,000 visitors. It covers a wide range of themes, such as research and development, industrial automation and information technology, industrial supply, production engineering and services, as well as energy and environmental technology.

In 2014, UNIDO signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Hannover Messe which was renewed in 2019. Throughout this period, UNIDO has supported the participation of institutions from twelve different developing countries in the fair, countries that would normally not be represented, and this lead to cumulatively over 900 new business leads. Some of these leads have translated into actual foreign direct investments.

The Hannover Messe carry a special weight as the birthplace and catalyst of Industry 4.0 (“Industrie 4.0”), it is attracting business and political leaders from all over the world who want to learn about the industrial leapfrogging potential through Industry 4.0 applications. This is also a topic that is in increasingly high demand in UNIDO’s Member States. Through UNIDO’s investment promotion work, UNIDO is actively supporting investment promotion agencies of its Member States in reorienting their targeting strategies towards attracting high-tech investments.

The Hannover Messe has also served as an ideal platform for UNIDO to organize several global forum events, aiming to further build investor confidence in participating countries. UNIDO’s Director General has also visited the Hannover Messe regularly. The cooperation with Hannover Messe in Germany has recently been expanded to Mexico, where UNIDO and the Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit (GMIS) promoted strategic approaches for the Fourth Industrial Revolution at the 2019 Industrial Transformation Mexico (ITM) event, which is part of the Hannover Messe brand.

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the 2020 edition of the Hannover Messe and the GMIS 2020, which was planned to be held during Hannover Messe, had both to be cancelled as physical events and are instead being brought to the virtual space. UNIDO expects to write further chapters of the successful collaboration with Hannover Messe at the 2021 edition (12-14 April 2021) and future editions.

Read the brochure here.

For further information, contact Stefan Kratzsch (S.Kratzsch [at] unido.org)