Following dozens of cancellations from the largest companies in the telecom industry, the GSM Association announced today it has canceled this year’s Mobile World Congress scheduled to hold in Barcelona from February 24-27, this year.
“With due regard to the safe and healthy environment in Barcelona and the host country today, the GSMA has canceled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event,” said John Hoffman, CEO of GSMA Ltd. (the branch of the organization that runs its events), in a statement.
The dominos started to fall even before February 7, when Ericsson, one of the show’s largest exhibitors and one of the world’s largest telecom gear suppliers, pulled out of MWC Barcelona due to coronavirus concerns. At that point, the GSMA had already been taking precautions in anticipation of worried delegates. On February 5, Light Reading asked the question that hung in the air: How Badly Will Coronavirus Hurt MWC?
The cancellations was forced by the pulling out of such giant tech companies as, NTT DoCoMo, the first to pull out, followed AT&T, Cisco, Facebook and Sprint, Rakuten joins AT&T, DoCoMo and Sprint, Nokia, VEON and BT quit MWC, odds shorten on event’s cancellation
The last straw was the announcement of Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone that they have joined the list of companies pulling out on account of Coronovirus global spread
