From November 15th to 17th BC Wood was back at Tokyo’s Big Sight to exhibit at this year’s Japan Home & Building Show. This has traditionally been our largest event in the market with many members making the trip over to take part. We had a total of 8 members take part directly on the show floor.
This edition marked the first truly “normal” Japan Home & Building Show since before COVID. Japan only fully reopened its borders in May and you could feel it on the show floor as the international flavour was back, especially with large numbers of Chinese and Korean visitors. The same phenomenon could be seen with the exhibitors. Up until this year, the BC Wood organized Canadian was basically the only foreign presence at the show. This time, however, there were exhibitors from all over Asia as well as Europe. Last year, even Japanese companies were shy about exhibiting with COVID fears lingering. With those fears gone, all of the space was sold out and you could feel the show’s traditional energy was back.
The end of COVID also saw an increase of over 30% in the number of visitors with 39,165 professionals coming through over the three days. This compares to 29,810 last year and only 10,137 in 2021. In fact, this year’s traffic was even greater than the shows in the years leading up to the pandemic. Since earlier this year, all construction industry shows had seen rebounds in the numbers of visitors, but it is great to see that now both exhibitors and attendees have fully returned.
As a result of BC Wood’s long-time presence at the show, even exhibiting during the dark days of COVID, the show organizers gave us the prime space right in front of the main entrance to the show. This afforded us a constant flow of traffic past our pavilion and we were the easiest exhibitor to locate. We capitalized on this opportunity by giving out BC Wood promotional materials to over 1000 attendees and also developing over 200 new contacts that we will be able to use in promotions on the behalf of members going forward.
Overall, we had a very successful showcase of the Canadian value-added industry, promoting a variety of members’ products as well as collecting a large number of new contacts. We are looking forward to building on these successes and creating an even bigger impact at the larger Nikkei Architectural and Construction Materials show coming up in March. For more information on the Nikkei Show, please contact Jim Ivanoff at ivanoff@bcwood.jp.