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).The respondent were presented three scenarios for their reflection. The company would invest time and money in conference and exhibitions whether saving time and cost would be a concern for company in allowing their staff to travel to conference and exhibitions and whether their corporations would invest money in conferences and exhibitions.
The results revealed that, for most of the respondents expected organizations to maintain a strong commitment to live events with compared to today in 2020, my company will still invest.