The first Consumer Electronics Show, all the way back in 1967, was a mere offshoot of the Chicago Music Show, attracting a modest 17,500 visitors and 100 exhibitors. Now, with 4,300 exhibitors across more than 2.5mn square feet of prime Las Vegas space hosting 135,000 attendees, events don’t come much bigger than CES. It is one of the world’s largest trade shows.
It’s easy to see quite how big a deal CES is, both in absolute terms and as proportion of the total revenues of its parent organization, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). The 2020 CES, held just before the pandemic halted in-person events, generated more than $127mn in revenues, accounting for more than 95% of the CTA’s total. The cost of hiring out the Las Vegas Venetian hotel, at more than $7.1mn, was alone more than the $5.2mn brought in by the CTA’s membership dues.
The pandemic, of course, almost wiped out that revenue in 2021. An online-only replacement still brought in some money, but – at just shy of $13mn – it was a fraction, and the CTA’s entire revenues that year were only $18.2mn.
CES, however, managed something of a bounceback in 2022, with even revenues topping $75.5mn out of the CTA’s total of $82mn, though still down almost 38% on pre-pandemic numbers. It also successfully managed to hold an event in 2023. Was the pandemic just a blip in CES’s long run of success? That question is likely to depend on the bigger structural issues facing the show.
| CTA/ CES $mn SnapShot | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 |
| Total revenue | 81.9 | 18.3 | 127.4 |
| CES | 75.5 | 12.7 | 121.4 |
| Membership | 6.1 | 5.3 | 5.2 |
| Publications | 0.20 | 0.13 | 0.24 |
| Meetings + confs | 0.11 | 0.06 | 0.40 |
| Fees + assessments | 0.07 | 0.03 | 0.20 |
One is simply that many tech firms have realized that you can make the world come to you, whether that’s journalists and influencers flying in or the simply huge audiences which launch events get online. Take, for instance, Apple, which has never attended CES, but gets big audiences for its own hosted launches. When you’ve spent more than $5bn to create a huge sci-fi donut HQ with a state of the art theater, why not make the most of it?
As one tech journalist attendee of CES points out, the show is “one of the most high profile casualties of the death of the ‘gadget’ at the hands of the smartphone. As general purpose devices have eaten ever greater portions of the consumer electronics industry, the conference has struggled to find its position: is it for smartphone accessories? Smart home devices? “Boring” tech like TVs and WiFi routers?”
TV makers at least did still turn up in force to this year’s CES, with arguably the second most-ubiquitous device category on offer, and one that is still very much focused on the hardware. But the trends in tech are moving even further away from CES’s strengths as a physical place to show off devices.
The past few cycles of smartphones, the one truly ubiquitous piece of high-end technology these days, have seen only incremental improvements in the hardware. Real innovation has tended to come through software and that’s likely to continue into other device categories. Right now, the hottest topic in tech is AI, something that doesn’t lend itself as well to a showy booth or stand as it does to a filmed presentation that can be shown pretty much anywhere – and online.
The demise of another big event in an adjacent space, gaming expo E3, is instructive here. Also run by a trade body, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), that event was somewhat smaller, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of its parent organisation’s revenue. In the year before the pandemic forced a cancellation in 2020, revenues were almost $20mn, accounting for around half the ESA’s income, with the other biggest contribution, of almost $15mn, coming from membership dues that were around three times higher than those of the CTA. The 2020 cancellation slashed the expo’s reported revenues down to just $15k and while an online event, as with CES, brought in some money, another cancellation in 2022 was the final nail in the coffin before it was called off permanently last year.
The cancellation of E3 over Covid was the first, and perhaps fatal, blow, but other factors were already having an impact. That was partly a similar realisation among the biggest players in gaming that a trade expo may not be the only or best way to show off big releases. There have also been changes in the gaming industry that have reduced the relative importance of the kind of AAA games that E3 had been famous for launching. As Ampere analyst Piers Harding-Rolls, said at the time, E3 had “struggled to remain relevant and reinvent itself”.
CES does seem in better health, and its had a remarkably consistent run, other than that Covid blip. Going back to public filings from 2004, total revenues for the CTA (again skewed very heavily towards the show,)were about $48mn. That’s just shy of $80mn in today’s money – about what the CTA brought in in 2022.
But staying relevant when the very industry it is designed to show-off is changing, is going to be an even bigger challenge than surviving a lockdown-imposed fallow year. CES’s almost 60 year run just may not go on much longer. Or will it? Pessimists have written it off before. Will CES be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary in 2027?
