CES Exceeded Expectations

As someone who has been attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas since the early 1980s, I have often been asked by industry types between Thanksgiving and the New Year, "How's the show going to be?" It took me a few years of experience of going to the show to detect a trend and use it as my stock answer. Here it is: "If holiday retail sales are good, retailers will have clean inventories, be upbeat and buy plenty of products at CES, so everyone will be happy. But if sales are down, the mood at the show will be one of gloom and doom."

My stock answer has always held true… except for this year. For publicly held retailers holiday sales were either down or flat, and mostly highly promotional. With my theory that should have meant retailers and manufacturers would have undergone their version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and CEA attendance should have been flat at best.

Well, so much for conventional wisdom. Retailers and manufacturers acknowledged the pain of a mediocre holiday sales season during CES, but didn't cry about it. More than a handful of industry execs I spoke to in Vegas said, "We're just happy that 2002 is over and we're in a new year."

As for show attendance, this observer has never seen as many people at any CES I have ever attended. There seemed to be even more people attending this year's "World Cup of Technology," as CEA president Gary Shapiro calls CES, than ever before, and I was right. His organization reported that 116,687 attended the show.

I think that there are several keys to how the show has changed that debunked my old theory about CES. One is that while retailers still make up a sizeable share of attendees at CES, more constituencies now attend the event. Over the past several years show organizer CEA has gotten more purchasing agents, international visitors, chip manufacturers, technology designers, and members of the cable, broadcast, wireless, computer and gaming industries to attend CES, along with plenty of government types from Washington and more media than I have ever seen.

But most importantly I think there is a common belief among all these groups, consumers included, that made the show as exciting as it has ever been: great and genuine enthusiasm about the industry's products.

Whether you are interested in video, home and car audio, home networking, digital imaging, wireless communications, wired and wireless home networking, all of which are being driven by digital technology, the product introductions at CES were compelling. More importantly there were plenty of visions of future products and product concepts that should be available next year and the year after.

No industry is recession-proof, as we have seen. Still, during a time of economic and political uncertainty, both here and around the world, to be involved in an industry and an event that can create such genuine optimism and enthusiasm is a real blessing.

TWICE's wrap-up of International CES continues with next week's issue, January 27, which will include an analysis of CEA's manufacturer shipment statistics by product category for 2002 and projections for 2003 and beyond.