The Mobile World Congress (MWC) continues to strongly press the accelerator. The technology fair, the most important held in the city, is finalizing the details of its next edition with the forecast that everything will be "bigger and better," in the words of Mats Granryd, CEO of GSMA, the association responsible for organizing it.
After largely exceeding expectations last year, once again placing itself above the 100,000 attendees mark, the exhibition expects attendance to increase again this year. The participation of Asian attendees will contribute, awaiting to see if DeepSeek participates, the Chinese company that has turned the international economy upside down with its cheaper AI model compared to its American competitors.
Of course, as the organizers have been repeating for years, the MWC's focus is not so much on growing for growth's sake, which doesn't hurt either, but on attracting the highest-level executives. That is, those who have decision-making power to close deals and secure investments for the main technological multinationals worldwide. "We are going to be more, but this is not the important thing, but rather bringing the right people," Granryd emphasizes.
What will also grow will be the economic impact that the MWC will leave in the city. If in 2024 it was around 500 million euros, it is expected to rise "significantly" this year, as highlighted by the CEO of GSMA, John Hoffman. It will reach between 540 and 550 million euros. The annual estimate given to quantify what the exhibition entails includes both spending in the host economy due to the MWC and the taxes collected by the Government with its celebration. Since the arrival of Mobile in Barcelona in 2006, it has left about 7,000 million euros.
From Monday, March 3 to March 6, some 2,700 exhibitors will participate in this edition of MWC, where artificial intelligence will once again be the main protagonist. "You can feel the same energy that was there when the mobile industry emerged. Everything is possible and it's going to happen," says Hoffman. Some exhibitors will come for the first time, such as Alibaba Cloud, China Unicom, Databricks, Indra, KDDI Spherience, Liberty Global, or Siemens. Preparations for larger exhibitors like Huawei and Ericsson begin weeks in advance. This has been detected by Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), the city's other major technology fair that cannot fully fill the entire exhibition center due to its coincidence with MWC.
Nevertheless, the Mobile is completely full. Even more so when 80% of the stands were already reserved before the previous edition ended. They are squeezing every square meter of the exhibition center, Hoffman emphasizes. For this reason, the Mobile organizers are eagerly looking at the Fira Gran Via expansion project, with an eye on 2027, when a new pavilion will be completed, reaching a total area of 300,000 square meters. This year it has been possible to save space with the relocation of the Talent Arena to the Montjuïc venue, but next year imagination will be needed, with external structures or with more multi-story exhibitors.
The gadgets that the stands will showcase will be complemented by 1,200 speakers, including the Vice President of the European Commission Teresa Ribera, the CEO of Multiverse, Euan Blair, the Chairman and CEO of Lenovo, Yang Yuanqing, the Chairman of FCC, Brendan Carr, or the CEO of Agility Robotics, Peggy Johnson. 40% of the speakers will be women.