As of February 21, increasing numbers of announcements are being made about how coronavirus is impacting major conferences worldwide.  Most notable to date is the cancellation of Mobile World Congress, the largest telecom trade show and conference in Europe, originally scheduled for February 24-27 in Barcelona.

And the RSA Conference, one of the largest cybersecurity conferences, taking place on February 24-28 in San Francisco, lost platinum sponsor IBM as an attendee. AT&T also cancelled its participation.  At present, nine vendors have withdrawn their participation; six of which are from China, two from the US, and one from Canada. So far, about 1% of the total number of expected attendees have also canceled.  RSA plans to proceed as scheduled and unless a major catastrophe related to COVID-19 happens in the next few days.

Facebook cancelled its Global Marketing Summit March 9-12, and pulled out of San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) taking place March 16-20.  As of now, that conference is still scheduled to run.

The Beijing Auto Show, originally scheduled for late April was postponed to an undetermined date. The epicenter of conference cancellations is China where dozens of other conferences are being cancelled including the Singapore Airshow, IT&CM China, CTW, IELA, NATAS, and CARhab. But the effects are spreading to the west rapidly.

If you are exhibiting, speaking at, or attending any conference or tradeshow in the next several weeks, please double check with the conference website or producer to ensure it’s still scheduled to take place.

There is an increasing level of uncertainty right now. We’ll update major announcements on Twitter @S3Speaking as we see them.