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Caspian Energy (CE): Iteca Caspian has been operating on the Azerbaijani and regional markets for many years. What are the trends of development of the exhibition market?  

Farid Mammadov, Director of Iteca Caspian: Iteca Caspian has been operating since 2000. Though, our partner, the British Company ITE Group, used to hold exhibitions in Azerbaijan on its own starting from 1995. 

At first, from 1995 to 2000 ITE, which had no office in Azerbaijan, held a trade exhibition called Azerbaijani International Trade Fair hosted at Heydar Aliyev Sports-Concert Complex. The exhibition covered several non-oil sectors of economy: medicine, construction, food industry and ICT. However, 5 years later it was manifest that it would be rather hard to develop this exhibition representing different industries at the same time.  A very fertile ground to develop an exhibition-conference business appeared out in Azerbaijan at that period. The government of Azerbaijan supported the flow of foreign companies and investors into the market of the country and consequently it found exhibitions a perfect tool for this process then. 

The local office of Iteca Caspian opened in 2000. Later the decision to split non-oil areas, represented by the Trade Fair, into different thematic exhibitions was made. This is the way the Healthcare (BIHE), Construction (BakuBuild), Food Industry (WorldFood) and Telecommunication (Bakutel) exhibitions appeared.  For this reason we moved from Heydar Aliyev sports complex to Grand Hotel Europe which can be addressed as an incubator for developing new free-standing specialized projects. Thus, we started from 4 small exhibitions which now occupy entire rooms at Baku Expo Centre. We would like to thank the government of the country for an invaluable support lent through all these years. And of course we are grateful to the management team of the Heydar Aliyev sports complex and Grand Hotel Europe which hosted us and rendered overall assistance in our initiatives. 

We had established our own exhibitions development strategy by that time. We managed to improve the exhibition portfolio. In the long term we wanted to be involved in the oil-gas exhibition in Azerbaijan taking into consideration big experience of ITE Company in arranging oil-gas exhibitions. Finally, such opportunity turned up in 2003. We took on this project with big willingness and for many years now we have been organizing an international Caspian Oil&Gas exhibition and conference, one of the biggest exhibitions of the region which has a rich history and significance for the country. High-level state support and economic situation, which has become more favorable since 2003 due to the growth of revenues of Azerbaijan gained from export of oil-gas resources, promoted high-speed development of the exhibition.  

The oil-gas industry was a driver from 2003 to 2008, which was also seen in the exhibition industry. The Caspian Oil and Gas overshadowed the rest projects. But from 2008 we have witnessed a very serious attention of both the state and commercial structures towards the non-oil sector. The non-oil sector exhibitions, which our business started with since the far 2000, gradually began showing a positive momentum.