Comdex cancelled for this fall

MediaLive International Inc. said on Wednesday that it is cancelling this year's Comdex trade show because of a lack of support from the industry's biggest IT vendors.

"While we could still run a profitable Comdex this year, it does not benefit the industry to do so without broader support of the leading technology companies," Robert Priest-Heck, MediaLive's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

MediaLive said the show is "postponed" rather than cancelled, while an advisory board looks at how to redesign Comdex to make it more appealing. But it also said in its statement that the next Comdex will take place in November 2005, suggesting that this year's event won't happen at all.

Other Comdex events around the world, which include shows in Korea, Scandinavia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Greece, will go ahead as planned, the company said.

Attendance at Comdex had been in decline since the Internet bubble burst, from about 200,000 in 2000 to 125,000 in 2003. Many attendees said the show had grown too big and unfocused, and a rival Las Vegas event, January's Consumer Electronics Show, became the place to be for high-tech vendors.

MediaLive tried to reinvent the event last year as a smaller, more focussed event purely for enterprise IT buyers. But it struggled to attract even its reduced target of 50,000 showgoers.