Barcelona is once again the world capital of technology. The Mobile World Congress (MWC) lands one more year in the city to present the main novelties of an expanding sector with the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) and the advance of 6G. The technology fair, the most important held in the Catalan capital, is completely full and once again occupies the Gran Via and Montjuïc fairgrounds, something it had not done since the pandemic. With 80% of the stands reserved before the previous edition ended, the show squeezes every available square meter, eagerly awaiting the new pavilion that Fira de Barcelona is building in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat.
After far exceeding expectations last year, once again placing itself above the 100,000 congress attendees mark, the show expects that in its nineteenth year in Barcelona everything will be "bigger and better" and that attendance will increase again. The participation of Asian congress attendees will contribute, among whom the Chinese AI from DeepSeek will finally not be present. The doubt is whether the pandemic will be completely left behind and the attendance record of 2019 will be surpassed, when 109,000 congress attendees were registered. As the organizers have been repeating for years, the focus of the MWC is not so much on growing for the sake of growing, which also doesn't hurt, but on attracting those top-level executives. That is, those who have decision-making power to close deals and secure investments for the main technological multinationals around the world. According to last year's records, more than half of the attendees were management positions and 20% were senior executives.
The GSMA, the association behind Mobile, also never tires of saying that the fair is much more than just mobile phones and that the thing now is about connectivity, with half of the exhibitors coming from sectors other than telcos, such as audiovisual, health, and automotive, with talking robots or failed attempts at flying cars taking all the flashes. Some of this year's main novelties will be ScentXP's scent personalization or Nokia and Elmo Cars' remote-controlled car. If you have a driver's license, and you carry it with you, you will be able to drive a vehicle in Finland from the L'Hospitalet fairgrounds. There will also be an F1 car decorated in Gaudí style. Despite this, mobile manufacturers will also unveil their latest models, with ultra-thin or foldable phones, even computers, from brands like Huawei, Oppo, and Lenovo, a trend that is not entirely convincing. Realme will present a terminal that changes color according to temperature.
From Monday, March 3 to Thursday, March 6, a week later than usual, more than 2,700 exhibitors will fill the Gran Via venue to the brim, about 300 more compared to last year. The main stands will be those of Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Telefónica, Xiaomi, and ZTE, but Google, Meta, Netflix, and TikTok will also be present. There will be some companies like Alibaba Cloud, China Unicom, Databricks, Indra, KDDI Spherience, Liberty Global, and Siemens participating for the first time. The economic impact of the congress is expected to be between 540 and 550 million euros, above last year's figure, when it exceeded for the first time 500 million euros. In the city's hotels, congress attendees have reserved almost all of the 40,000 available beds.
The gadgets that the stands will showcase will be complemented by 1,200 speakers, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, chess player Garry Kasparov, known for his criticism of the Kremlin, the new president of Telefónica, Marc Murtra, the CEO of Agility Robotics, Peggy Johnson, the vice-president of the European Commission Teresa Ribera, the co-founder of Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch, the CEO of Multiverse, Euan Blair, the chairman and CEO of Lenovo, Yang Yuanqing, and the chairman of FCC, Brendan Carr. 40% of the speakers will be women. The main attraction will be the Talent Arena, with conferences and hackathons to awaken technological vocations among attendees. A new bet by the GSMA to try to replicate the success it had with the Four Years From Now (4YFN), its entrepreneurship spin-off, now focusing on alleviating the lack of professionals for an increasingly digital economy.
For those looking for a place to have a drink after the exhibition, they will no longer be able to do so in the space that for years the L'Hospitalet de Llobregat City Council had set up outside the fairgrounds, with dishes from city restaurateurs and drinks at not-too-expensive prices. David Quirós' new council has chosen to dispense with an initiative that brought an event seen by residents as too elitist closer, allowing them to sit down for tapas accompanied by suited attendees leaving the congress while, often, some flamenco music played. However, Beat Barcelona will continue, the replica that the Barcelona City Council made within the MWC, with music, food, and drinks for when professional meetings end.