USTelecom, TIA Scuttle This Year’s Supercomm
USTelecom and TIA announced they're canceling Supercomm this year, after third-party convention planner EXPOCOMM said it didn’t want to manage the show because of negative financial projections. Supercomm could come back, though the outlook is uncertain. The show dates to 1988 and had already been tentatively pushed from a proposed June date to October in Chicago.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
EXPOCOMM said it “elected not to renew the contract to manage” the event this year “after careful review and counsel with co-owning Supercomm associations, TIA and USTelecom.” TIA and USTelecom had little more to say and top officials were unavailable for interviews Monday. Talks among the three about the future of the event have been ongoing for some time, one source said. “The two associations don’t rule out something in the future,” said USTelecom spokeswoman Anne Veigle. “They're continuing to educate their members and doing the things that the show provided.”
TIA and USTelecom split Supercomm in 2005, creating two shows: USTelecom’s TelecomNext and TIA’s Globalcomm. At the time, the relationships between the two groups was strained, with TIA officials suggesting USTelecom encouraged carriers not to attend their event. The two groups reunited in 2007 to hold what they initially called NXTcomm.
The problem since the shows reunited has been numbers, the same issue facing other industry trade shows. About 27,000 attended the 2005 show in Chicago, but in 2008 only 13,000 made the trip to Las Vegas. Half that number, 6,473, attended last year. Exhibit space rentals have also declined. The 2004 show had 300,000 square feet and 691 exhibiting companies, compared to 180,000 square feet and 500 exhibitors in 2008.