bauma Ready for Construction Industry

In late November, Trenchless Technology sister publication Compact Equipment dropped into the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan (the Paulaner NYC brewery and restaurant to be exact), visiting the marketing and management crew behind the biggest trade show on earth.

Simply called bauma, the global equipment- and construction-focused trade fair happens only every three years in the only place big enough to hold it — the Messe München exhibition center in Munich, Germany. Some of the booths for this show are so insanely big that exhibitors started building them in November for the one-week show April 11-17.

Bauma attracts the trenchless industry to Munich. Among the trenchless companies exhibiting at the 2016 event are: American Augers, HammerHead, Tracto-Technik GmbH, Ditch Witch, Subsite Electronics, The Robbins Co., Herrenknecht, mts Perforator GmbH, Prime Drilling, Vacuworx, Vermeer and Digital Control GmbH.

Covering this event — which usually attracts way more than 500,000 people from all around the world — is basically the decathlon of trade journalism. To experience how awesome and expansive this event is, Messe München (the group that runs the show) produced a video with a fairly incredible parkour athlete running the biggest trade show on Earth in three minutes.

“This video — don’t try it,” explained Stefan Rummel, new managing director for bauma. “You can’t run bauma in three minutes. Alex Pach is the stunt man that actually did that. It’s a video we prepared for you and for the world because we want to try to get across what bauma is all about — the pulsating emotion that is bauma. When you’re walking across the fair, you can feel this atmosphere there. It’s vibrant, and you can really see how this industry is gathering to show its newest innovations.”

Those innovations will occupy all 605,000 square meters of space at the trade fair center mentioned. “I think that’s about 120 football fields to put it in some American context,” Rummel said. Some 3,400 exhibitors are expected from every sector of the global construction market with a pretty solid American presence (about 130 exhibitors) — every one from Caterpillar to Bobcat to American Augers.

“We feel mining is getting more and more important for the construction industry as a whole,” Rummel said. “We have a lot of exhibitors who also have a lot of mining products. In the past, you’d have to know which exhibitor had mining products. Now, we’ve created a logo for that. It’s called Mining Inside, which will help direct you to all the exhibitors who have mining equipment. Over 700 exhibitors will be in Mining Inside, and this time it will be easy to find them.”

Always striving to maintain its status as the best place to glimpse the future of the equipment industry, bauma now has a new subtitle: “31st Edition of the World’s Leading Trade Fair for Construction Machinery, Building Material Machines, Mining Machines, Construction Vehicles and Construction Equipment.” That’s a serious subtitle, but that’s not the only new development. The trade show also has a new claim, which we feel is pretty accurate: “The heartbeat of our industry.”

“The heartbeat of our industry represents that bauma is really the pacemaker of this industry,” explained Rummel. “Exhibiting companies are adjusting their innovation cycles to coincide with bauma. With this subtitle, that should be reflected.”

Looking back, the last bauma, which took place in April 2013 (we were there), set new records in terms of the number of exhibitors and visitors and the amount of exhibition space. A total of 3,421 exhibitors from 57 countries, and 535,065 visitors from more than 200 countries converged on Munich for that event. And, taking up 575,000 square meters of space, bauma 2013 was also the largest trade show in the world in terms of exhibition area. Looking forward, you can learn all about the upcoming show at bauma’s website, which underwent a complete relaunch last year with a new responsive design, which we totally dig.

We’ll keep you updated on bauma as it approaches, as Compact Equipment is a media partner and will be attending the event in full force, blogging from the show floor.