Your new post is loading...
As the novel coronavirus continues to take a human and economic toll across the world, the lucrative business of tech conferences is not immune.
The direct economic loss from the cancellation from nine major tech conferences including Google I/O, Facebook’s F8 event, Mobile World Congress and now SXSW over coronavirus has already surpassed $1 billion, according to estimates the data intelligence company PredictHQ pulled for Recode. That number doesn’t even include what event organizers like Facebook itself would have made from the event. The figure just covers the losses to airlines, hotels, restaurants, and transportation providers that would normally make money from attendees’ purchases.
Some $480 million — the biggest loss — came from the cancellation of Mobile World Congress, which was supposed to host more than 100,000 attendees in Barcelona last month. That’s followed by SXSW, an Austin tech, music, and movie conference that had approximately 280,000 attendees last year and whose newly announced cancellation could result in $350 million in direct losses according to PredictHQ. The Game Developers Conference, a 30,000-person event that was scheduled for March but has been postponed, could incur $129 million in losses. Google I/O, a 5,000-person developer conferencehas a direct loss estimate of nearly $20 million.
While a number of events, including Facebook F8 and Adobe Summit, will still have an online component, that effort does not stave off the significant economic loss from canceling the physical event.
PredictHQ said there was a 500 percent increase in major event cancellations and postponements last month, and the International Air Transport Association this month increased previous estimates for airline travel losses from the coronavirus outbreak to up to $113 billion.
Oxford Economics estimates that business conferences generate more than a trillion dollars in direct spending annually; so far these canceled tech conferences haven’t put a major dent in that. Still, both tech companies and consumers will be responsible for bearing the brunt of their losses, as most major insurance companies exclude communicable disease losses from reimbursement.