I've been half-watching the MWC withdrawal list grow for about a week and a half now like its a scoreboard, and at this point I think its safe to say the thing is not going to happen in any real form. LG bailed first, back around the end of January. Then Ericsson. Then Nvidia and Amazon pulled their booths. Sony went too. And on Friday, Facebook announced it wasn't sending anyone, which felt like the moment this stopped being "a few cautious companies" and started being an actual pattern.
GSMA, the group that runs the show, keeps putting out statements about enhanced hygiene measures and temperature checks and hand sanitizer stations at the venue in Barcelona, like the problem is that nobody's told the coronavirus about the extra soap dispensers. The show is still scheduled for February 24th through 27th. I'll believe it happens when I see forty thousand people standing shoulder to shoulder in Fira Gran Via, which, as of today, I do not believe.
I get why GSMA doesn't want to cancel. That event is reportedly close to 500 million euros for the local economy, hotels are booked, and a huge chunk of small and mid-size vendors depend on it to get in front of carriers they'd never otherwise reach. Canceling isn't just "oh well, see you next year," it's a genuine gut punch to a lot of smaller companies who don't have Sony's marketing budget to fall back on. But at some point continuing to insist the show will go on, while your own headline exhibitors quietly disappear off the map one by one, starts looking less like confidence and more like denial. I'd rather they just rip the band-aid off.
Here's the thing that makes this weirder to watch: Samsung is doing the exact opposite. Unpacked is tomorrow, February 11th, in San Francisco, and as far as I can tell nothing about it has changed. Galaxy S20, S20+, S20 Ultra, and the folding Z Flip are all expected to show up on stage at the Palace of Fine Arts like normal. Samsung ditched MWC as its big launch venue a couple years back in favor of running its own show earlier in the year, and it turns out that decision, made for entirely unrelated reasons, is looking pretty smart right now. They get to have their moment without any of this hovering over it.
(Small tangent, because I can't help myself: this is the second time in about a week that "an app breaking in a very public way" has been a tech headline, after the Iowa caucus reporting app fell over on caucus night and turned what should've been a two-hour story into a four-day one. Different scale of problem obviously, one's a trade show logistics issue and one was a homemade app nobody stress-tested, but I do think we're going to look back on early 2020 as a moment where a lot of institutions found out the hard way that "we built an app for this" isn't the same as "the app works.")
Anyway. My prediction, and I'm writing it down here so I can either look smart or delete this post in two weeks: MWC 2020 either gets formally cancelled or gets so hollowed out that GSMA cancels it themselves to save face, sometime in the next week or two. The exhibitor list is already down probably 15-20% from a month ago and I don't see that trend reversing. If you had a flight booked to Barcelona for this, I'd start looking at the change fees now rather than waiting for an official announcement, because by the time GSMA says the word, everyone else will be trying to rebook at the same time too.
I don't love being the guy who roots for a trade show to fold, for the record. A lot of good product gets shown at MWC that never makes it stateside otherwise, and I always liked scrolling through the coverage even when I wasn't there in person. But pretending a slow leak isn't a leak doesn't fix anything either.