Bangkok

Five exhibitors from the Free State at the Metalex in Bangkok

Again this year, five firms from Saxony and the state’s chamber of industry and commerce are represented at the Metalex in Bangkok, Thailand. At Asia’s largest trade fair for mechanical engineering and metal processing they anticipate some good business deals and the mood is optimistic in spite of the political unrest of last spring.

“Things are really moving here in Southeast Asia, but many German medium-sized businesses are not here,” reports Michael Voss, CEO of Stahlhandel Gröditz, who is at Metalex for the second time with a stand and has not regretted it for a minute. The Saxon pavilion is always well visited and business with this part of the world will even soon be expanded. “This is the largest and by far most interesting trade fair in all of Asia,” Voss explains. Similar trade fairs in Malaysia or Vietnam are merely “minor copies.” Customers come to Bangkok from as far as Japan and Indonesia. With its 2,700 exhibitors and eleven international pavilions, 4,000 newly presented machines as well as 500 conferences and seminars, Metalex, which will come to an end this Saturday, is comparable with the Intec trade fair for production engineering, machine tool manufacture and special purpose machinery manufacture, which will be held in Leipzig again next year. That’s how Michael Stopp sees it as head of the business area industry/foreign trade at the Chamber of Industry and Commerce of Chemnitz. He is directly representing five Saxon firms at the Bitec trade grounds in the south of the Thai capital city and functions as the contact for the Verbundinitiative Maschinenbau Sachsen. “There may be a few more international exhibitors at the show in Bangkok.” There are 25 percent more than in 2009.

“It’s actually a must for businesses in this sector to be here,” says Stopp. Developments in the ten countries of the ASEAN region are rapid and economic growth of between five and ten percent is the norm. According to Stopp, the huge cuts in trade fair funding by the Saxon economic ministry are all the more counterproductive. “There are practically no more machines to buy in the region, so it’s all the more important for a country whose prosperity depends on exports to be oriented towards the only big growth markets at the present time: Southeast Asia and Latin America,” according to the chamber employee.

Bavaria has just considerably increased its trade fair funding for medium-sized businesses while Saxony’s economic minister Sven Morlok (FDP) is making cutbacks in a state that is dominated by medium-sized business. “The small and medium-sized firms ought to enjoy highest priority in Saxony,” Stopp demands, for the state presently is at four percent of overall German exports, whereby it could be ten percent based on its economic strength.