A global overview of the exhibition industry is even more difficult to provide. While there is general agreement on the definition of exhibitions, and the Convention Industry Council’s (CIC) definition presents an example of this, there is little global information on the trends in this sector. The industry tends to assess its performance on the size of the space used for exhibitions, but there is no consistency in the boundaries of these measures.
A study undertaken on the South African Exhibition sector (Heath et al, 2005) and that undertaken in
Australia (Deery et al, 2005) show some trends that could be extrapolated to the global situation. In
South Africa, for example, the average number of exhibitions per exhibition organiser increased from
1.97 in 2001 to 2.2 exhibitions per organiser in 2004. The majority of exhibitions (77%) take place
annually, which is consistent with the Australian situation (73% in 2003).