Less than a year after opening our first sales office in India, Eldon was ready to hold our first exhibition there, and chose the premier show, "Automation 2008" to launch Eldon CS in grand style.
Due to the complexity of moving existing exhibition equipment to India, Eldon decided to construct a new stand especially for the show on-site, which was planned and designed by our Marketing Team and Ashok Menghani (Sales Manager Eldon CS).
It took 20 local craftsman 3 days to produce the stand in time for the opening day, although our exhibition team were on hand to offer guidance, as different interpretations of drawings were debated!
Eldon is reliably informed that although the experience was different to running any other exhibition, it was incredible none the less, and the result was so good we won an award for the best stand by a foreign participant! But when you have the largest stand in the exhibition, it needs to be amazing (120 mtrs sq).
When you set up business in a country with the second highest population in the world (1,132,446,000 or 16.93% of the world´s total population. China has 1,326,500,00 people), it isn´t easy getting your name established, so the first few visitors to the show were almost shy in approaching us!
It was also pretty amazing that we received more leads on our first day at Automation 2008 than we did on our best day at Hannover Messe (which was equally regarded as a successful show). In fact the number of leads grew dramatically every day, which means our Indian Sales Team are going to have their hands full for some time to come.
Although it´s normal to judge the success of a exhibition by the number of leads received, the quality of the leads is in fact far more important. This is probably the most amazing fact about Automation 2008, because the quality of leads we received from some of the biggest international companies in the world was truly incredible.
We also used Automation 2008 to bring our growing network of distributors together, and organised a spectacular dinner for the Friday night. Spectacular but ever so spicy apparently!
The first Automation exhibition was in 2002, and it is biennial event.
Mumbai (it changed it´s name from Bombay in 1995) is the main financial, commercial and entertainment (Bollywood is in Mumbai) capital of India, and is the home to 13,662,885 people (it is the most populous city in India and the second most populous in the world. Shanghai is the most populous with 15,584,627 people).
Mumbai generates 5% of India´s GDP and is one of the Worlds Top 10 centres for commerce (by global financial flow).
Mumbai is also where we put Eldon on the map... of India!
Eldon would like to thank all of you who visited our stand at Automation 2008 and the team who made it all happen: Abishek, Alex, Almudena, Ashok, Colin, Girish, Julian, Rahul, Wieger and Yvonne, and of course 20 ever so helpful local crafstmen...!
Eldon Website (India):
http://www.eldon.com/in/