Key3Media draws curtain over big shows

By Paul Montgomery

Events organiser Key3Media has closed down its Australian operations, sounding what might be the final death knell for the giant tech trade show.

The company announced last month that it would not hold the March 2003 edition of its flagship show Networld+Interop & IT Comdex, and sales director Patricia Valleja told the industry in an email that the Australian office had now shut down.

"In fact the Key3Media office in Australia is no longer," she said in the email. "The US office has decided to consolidate and the first to go is Australia."

The Australian exit follows similar withdrawals from shows in Chicago, Vancouver, Montreal, Atlanta and New York on September 18, as Key3Media CEO Fred Rosen told Dow Jones that he blamed "an industry that's being hammered". The company had said at the time that the closures did not affect non-American events.In its core US market, Key3Media is refocusing on vertical industry events such as BioSecurity and Next Generation Network, as well as sponsored user conferences such as Java ONE and the Intel Developer Forum. Surviving technology event organisers in Australia, such as IIR, IBC, Terrapinn and IQPC, are concentrating on smaller, focused seminars rather than all-encompassing industry shows.

DISCLOSURE: Knapp Communications, the publisher of idm.net.au, has supported events run by some companies named in this story.

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