Italy will host the 17th edition of ITMA, the world’s largest exhibition of textile machinery. It will be held at the Fiera Milano Rho exhibition centre in Milan, from November 12 to 19, 2015.
Fiera Milano won the international bid organised by CEMATEX, the owner of the ITMA show, after beating three other short-listed bidders from an original list of 12. This high-profile exhibition is returning to Milan after 20 years, and the news will be welcomed not only by the city itself, but also by the region’s large textile machinery industry.
Sandro Salmoiraghi, president of ACIMIT, the association of Italian textile machinery manufacturers, said, “The award of ITMA 2015 to Fiera Milano is the clearest sign that by working together we can achieve a very competitive bid.”
ITMA is an exhibition which should not be missed by any companies working in the textile industry. It attracted 118,000 visitors from 151 countries during its 2007 edition in Munich, over 80 per cent of whom came from outside Germany. In 2015 the show is projected to take up 100,000 sq. m. net of the exhibition space in the Rho-Pero venue.
“We are very proud to announce this success,” Fiera Milano General Manager Enrico Pazzali said. “ITMA is in fact much more than a big exhibition. It is a very special event which takes place every four years, and all the major exhibition centres in Europe, which are large enough to host it are always very keen to win this important contract. The event has a special significance for us. It represents recognition of our expertise as well as the high quality of Fiera Milano’s services provided to exhibition organisers. But it is also the “jewel in the crown” for the Italian textile machinery industry which leads the world in textile production and exports. For this reason all the associations within the textile industry, which have cooperated with Fiera Milano in various B2B events, have firmly supported and encouraged us in this bid.”
Stephen R Combes, president of CEMATEX, said, “We are delighted to announce that ITMA 2015 will be held in Milan. Our selection process took over a year and our investigations into all the short-listed venues were very thorough. We are extremely impressed with both the management team of Fiera Milano as well as the quality of the services and the infrastructure on-site, and we are convinced that we shall be offering our exhibitors and visitors a superb event there in 2015.”
ITMA is the world’s largest textile and garment machinery exhibition. It is held every four years in a different country (it is in fact a peripatetic show) and the event attracts a large number of highly qualified international visitors and top decision makers. Indeed, no major textile manufacturer decides to invest in new machinery without paying a visit to an ITMA show.
Preparations for the next ITMA event in Barcelona (September 22 to 29, 2011) are well underway; over 1,000 exhibitors have already applied for space, and the exhibition is on course to achieve its target size of 100,000 sq. m. net.
CEMATEX is the umbrella association for the textile machinery manufacturers of nine European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.). In addition to the European event CEMATEX also holds an ITMA show in Asia, currently in China every two years. Singapore hosted the first two ITMA ASIA shows in 2001 and 2005, while the subsequent events – ITMA ASIA + CITME – were held in Shanghai in 2008 and 2010, with the next one taking place in June 2012.
