At the start of September this year, almost 200,000 people descended upon Berlin for the world’s biggest trade show dedicated to consumer electronics and home appliances: IFA. It’s a show with a long and glistening history, too. This is where Philips unveiled the CD, Telefunken the first widely available TV sets and Sony the world’s first video cassette player.
Unless we missed it, nothing to match the import of those releases happened at this year’s show, which celebrates its 100th anniversary next year, but it was a bustling event. One that suggests trade shows are on their way back to full health after three extremely difficult years because of Covid.
Here, we pick out the key trends from the showfloor and the products that caught our eye. We also give six products our best-of-show awards.
A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE?
IFA’s show organisers made much of sustainability at this year’s show. And it isn’t just for posturing: according to Oliver Merlin, IFA’s managing director, this is a response to consumer demand. “I would say, even only a year or so ago, sustainability was at maybe number four, number five [in reasons to buy a product], right behind the price, behind the brand, behind the quality of the product,” he said at the show’s opening press conference. “Now, sustainability is one or two.”
That was based on data from IFA’s partner, consumer research specialists GfK, and was no doubt one of the reasons that the show created an area dedicated to sustainability for the first time. Called the Sustainability Village, it contained a handful of companies with the S word at their heart, along with an area for speakers. These included Fairphone, whose employees gave practical demonstrations on how to upgrade phones. And we attended one session on how robots could help to make industry more sustainable, rather than being a further drain on components and minerals.
Would we have liked to see a bigger Sustainability Village, packed to the hilt with companies that put environmental considerations first? Yes, absolutely. But even though only Ambient Photonics, below, made our cut for this feature, we saw many companies
