Midwest to Get Its Own Medical Design & Manufacturing

Los Angeles-based Canon Communications will launch a Chicago-area edition of its Medical Design & Manufacturing brand, MD&M Midwest, Sept. 23–25. Canon will collocate the new show at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont with several others it has launched and acquired over the past year, reaching its goal of building a multi-faceted manufacturing event in the Midwest.

Kevin O'Keefe, Canon's senior vice president of events, said the new MD&M launch was "part of the plan" the company had been executing over the last couple years. "The goal of all the various shows we have in Anaheim, New York and Atlanta is to have medical as part of that mix."

In May 2006, the company acquired eight manufacturing shows from Reed Exhibitions. In February of this year, it agreed to buy Plastics USA — North America's Marketplace from the Society of the Plastics Industry.

In addition, Canon has shuffled some shows between the Midwest and Southeast, changed the makeup of others and gotten industry support for yet others.

The result is an East (spring)-Midwest (fall)-West (winter) annual series of multi-faceted manufacturing events that include medical design, plastics, electronics and other segments, as well as a Southeast market that is under development.

The Midwest collocation will include five shows in 2008:

• Assembly Technology Expo
• Electronics Assembly Show
• MD&M Midwest
• Natl. Manufacturing Week
• Plastics USA/PLASTEC Midwest

Quality Expo, which rotates to Detroit in even-numbered years, will be the sixth show in the Midwest lineup in odd-numbered years.

O'Keefe was in Rosemont for the move-in of this fall's event when he spoke to Tradeshow Week, and said he was expecting 1,400 companies to fill 275,000 net square feet of exhibit space.

Next fall, with the addition of 40,000 net sq. ft. for MD&M Midwest, the event should fill the Stephens Convention Center at about 325,000 net sq. ft., he said. With the return of Quality Expo in 2009, he expects the event to max out the facility at 350,000 net sq. ft.

"We sent the release (about MD&M Midwest) out today and got a tremendous response," he said. "We have the floor plan up, and we have about 70 companies on it already."

As for attendees, O'Keefe said Canon had a database of about 40,000 prospects to draw on for the shows, between its own database of 24,000 and access to others.

He said most of these prospects were within a 200-mile drive-in radius of Rosemont: "They don't go to any of the other shows we run, so it's very much an underserved market."

O'Keefe doesn't expect the launch of an MD&M Midwest to cannibalize the existing MD&M Minneapolis Conference & Exhibition and MidPak that takes place each October, because that show has reached its limit, in terms of audience density.

"It was created just for the concentration in medical alley, a handful of very large cardiovascular equipment producers, that we couldn't get to attend the New York or Anaheim shows," he said. "It has grown from 20,000 to 100,000 sq. ft., and the problem is that the entire medical database for the Twin Cities area is about 20,000 people, and we typically bring in 5,000 for each edition. But that's it."

Asked whether the new MD&M at Rosemont would step on anyone else's toes, O'Keefe said, "I think to some extent it will have a negative impact in 2008 on the machine tool show the second week of September, because we're going to be ramping up a very significant attendee campaign this year."

He was referring to the biennial Assn. for Manufacturing Technology's Intl. Manufacturing Technology Show, No. 3 on the most recent TSW 200 with 1.16 million net sq. ft. of space, 1,781 exhibitors and 92,965 attendees (including exhibit personnel).

Peter Eelman, AMT's vice president of exhibitions, disagreed that Canon's collocated shows would have a negative impact on his own. "We're a big, big show," he said. "Competitors have come and gone over the years. So far, we're still standing."

Eelman added that there was more than enough room in the manufacturing space for his and other events. "When you look at a manufacturing plant, a lot goes into it," he said.

Whereas his show is more about "the actual big machinery," others could be more about "keeping the lights on and moving things around the floor," he said. "We don't really bang heads. There's such diversity."

Besides, "we're not planning to cut our budget, so we'll be promoting aggressively," Eelman said, adding that for the Sept. 8–13 IMTS, he's already sold 1.15 million net sq. ft.