Right about now I should be standing in a badge line at Fira Gran Via with a lanyard full of hotel key cards and a phone at 12% battery, complaining about the coffee prices. Instead I'm sitting at my kitchen table in sweatpants, which, fine, isnt the worst outcome, but its a weird one.
Mobile World Congress was supposed to run this week, Feb 24 through 27, in Barcelona. GSMA pulled the plug on it back on February 12th, and honestly by the time they made it official it felt almost anticlimactic, because the exhibitor list had already been bleeding out for days before that. LG went first. Then Ericsson. Then Nvidia, Amazon, Sony, Facebook, Vodafone, BT, Sprint, Intel, Cisco, AT&T. By the time GSMA actually said the words "MWC 2020 is cancelled," something like half the big names had already quietly withdrawn their booths, so the announcement read less like a decision and more like a formality catching up to reality.
The reason, obviously, is the coronavirus outbreak. At the time GSMA pulled out there were something like 44,000 confirmed cases, almost all still concentrated in China, and Barcelona isnt exactly next door to Wuhan. But youre talking about an event that pulls in over 100,000 people from basically every country with an airport, packs them into halls for four days, and has them shake hands and share pens at a thousand tiny booths. I get why nobody wanted to be the company whose logo was on a hall that turned into a headline.
I wasnt even mad about it, which surprised me a little. I've gone to MWC three times now and every single year I've sworn Im not doing it again, and every single year Ive gone back. Its exhausting in a way thats hard to explain if you havent done a trade show like that. Youre on your feet for ten, eleven hours, the wifi is garbage despite every carrier on earth having a booth twenty feet away, and by day three youve had approximately four real meals and eleven espressos. So a big part of me, the part that already had flights and a hotel booked in the Gothic Quarter for way too much money, was quietly relieved when the refund emails started coming in.
But theres another part of it thats less fun to think about. A show like MWC is where a lot of the smaller companies, the ones that arent Samsung or Huawei with the budget to do their own standalone event, get their one shot a year at press attention and buyer meetings. Little component makers, regional carriers, accessory manufacturers who fly out a two person team and spend their whole marketing budget on one 3x3 meter booth. Those companies dont get a do-over. Samsung already did its own Unpacked event on February 11th without any of this drama, announced the Galaxy S20 lineup and the Z Flip, the one with the actual folding glass screen, $1,380, shipped February 14th. Huawei was going to do a big P40-adjacent showing at MWC that just isnt happening now, at least not in that form.
Theres also a smaller, weirder cost that I dont think gets talked about enough, which is what happens to a city that builds a meaningful chunk of its February economy around one week. Barcelona hotels, restaurants, the taxi drivers who all know exactly which week this is because it triples their fares, the temp staffing agencies that hire a small army of badge scanners and booth workers. Thats not nothing. I dont have a real solution for that, I just think its worth sitting with for a second instead of only talking about which chipmaker didnt get to show off its new modem.
Anyway. My hotel refunded me in full, no questions, which honestly was faster than I expected from a hotel chain. My flight credit is sitting in an account somewhere waiting to be used for a trip I havent planned yet. And I've got a stack of MWC preview emails in my inbox from PR people that I guess I'll just leave unread, or maybe I'll actually reply and ask what happens to all those announcements now. Some of them will probably still trickle out as standalone press releases over the next few weeks, minus the noise of a hall, minus the free coffee, minus the sore feet. Might honestly be a better way to hear about a new chipset than shouting over a hall full of ringtones.