Achema is an enormous exhibition held every three years in Germany. This year, the number of exhibitors was approximately 4000 with over 180,000 visitors in attendance. With an exhibition space of nearly 140,000m2, it is hard to imagine how many days it would take to see each and every booth. Our UK subsidiary, A&D Instruments had their booth on the third floor of Hall 6 where many laboratory equipment booths were located.

The booth was rather small but got a lot of attention from visitors because of its corner location with a full and comprehensive range of our weighing products. We exhibited the MS-70 and MX-50 Moisture Analyzers, the SV-10/100 Viscometers and the AD-4212A weighing system at the front of the booth. All of these were demonstrated with their accompanying software, which displayed real-time test results on a computer screen.

Many people paused at our booth to see what was going on and began to talk with us about the demonstration units and then about the balances and scales, which were on display in the showcases behind the demonstration units.

On the morning of the first day it was very quiet and I began to worry about the lack of visitors - but then all of a sudden, a "huge wave" of visitors arrived. This large number had come up from the ground floor and started to reach our booth before noon. It was quiet again around noon while visitors had lunch and then after lunch the booth filled up again with visitors. Our lunchtime on the other hand was very short, we boiled some German sausages in a small kitchen nearby and ate it with bread in just 10 minutes and then returned to speak with visitors.

I also did some research at Achema. During quiet periods at our booth, I wandered around visiting other booths. It sometimes took over 15 minutes to walk from hall to hall to reach the booth that I wanted to see – good exercise!


The five days at Achema passed very quickly and we left with many promising leads and high hopes for many new customers in the future.