Global association of the exhibition industry UFI has cancelled its 2020 UFI Asia-Pacific Conference and the Digital Innovation Forum due to Covid-19. Both events were originally scheduled to be held in Macau in March and were subsequently rescheduled for August.
The UFI team will return to Macau in 2022, however, to organise another edition of the UFI Asia-Pacific Conference. In 2021, the UFI Asia-Pacific Conference will take place in Melbourne, the first time an UFI event will take place in Australia.
In the meantime, UFI will work to facilitate meetings between members during the 2020 UFI Global Congress in a revised format. Open to more than 50,000 industry professionals globally who work for UFI member companies, UFI’s Global Congress is known as the exhibition industry’s largest global meeting of the year.
For more details on the UFI Global Congress, please visit www.ufi.org/congress2020.
Mark Cochrane, UFI regional manager, Asia-Pacific: said: “The UFI team worked closely with our hosts in Macau on this decision. Unfortunately, the travel restrictions across the region and around the world made it impossible to proceed with this event in Macau in 2020. We thank our hosts at the Macau Fair & Trade Association (MFTA) for their professionalism and understanding in this difficult situation and we look forward to bringing this event back to Macau at the earliest opportunity.”
Host of the cancelled UFI Asia-Pacific Conference 2020, the Macau Fair & Trade Association, said it understood and supported UFI’s decision given the current pandemic. "At MFTA, health and safety are our priority in order to ensure the recovery of the exhibition industry! Hence, we will look forward to welcoming the exhibition industry back to Macau when the time is right,” the association said.
