MWC back in BCN

Talks and de­bates

Other star techno firms show­ing off the con­tents of their up­dated port­fo­lios at the MWC will be Sony and HTC. The lat­ter, for ex­am­ple, is likely to re­veal the new ver­sion of its top-of-the-line model, the One M9, with a bet­ter 20 megapixel cam­era and im­proved audio sys­tem. How­ever, the Tai­wanese firm will no doubt place most em­pha­sis on its new line of smart wear­ables. Ac­cord­ing to a re­cent Bloomberg re­port, the wear­able de­vices will have their own eco-sys­tem that mon­i­tors sport­ing ac­tiv­ity that has been de­vel­oped in con­junc­tion with the sports wear brand, Under Ar­mour.

As usual, the big ab­sen­tee at the MWC will be Apple. Not that it will be silent at the time of the MWC, as the firm will be push­ing its Apple Watch for a spring re­lease. It it un­likely to launch at the MWC, but there is a chance it could make an ap­pear­ance be­fore or dur­ing the show to gain back some of the lime­light.

Be­yond the gad­gets at the MWC, the fair will, as al­ways, in­clude a raft of talks and round table de­bates on the fu­ture of mo­bile tech­nol­ogy. Among the par­tic­i­pants al­ready an­nounced by the or­gan­is­ers is Face­book cre­ator, Mark Zucker­burg, Ken Hu, the cur­rent CEO of Huawei, one of the fastest-grow­ing firms in the sec­tor. Also due to ap­pear will be the CEO of Line, Jeanie Han, Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, and the CEO of Qual­comm, Steve Mol­lenkopf. No doubt given the trend to­wards pay­ing with smart­phones, the heads of such fi­nan­cial com­pa­nies as VISA or BBVA are likely to make an ap­pear­ance.

Con­ti­nu­ity

The MWC lasts from March 2 to 5 in the Fira Gran Via. The fair began in Cannes under the name 3GSM World, be­fore it moved to the Cata­lan cap­i­tal in 2011. Last year's fair at­tracted 85,000 vis­i­tors with 90,000 ex­pected this year, mak­ing it one of the most suc­cess­ful and pop­u­lar trade fairs in Cat­alo­nia, Spain and even the world.

Noth­ing lasts for­ever, and Barcelona's con­tract with GSMA, the group that or­gan­ises the MWC, will ex­pire in 2018. There is still some time to go, but ru­mours about a change of venue are cir­cu­lat­ing. Nev­er­the­less, Agustí Cordón, head of the Fira de Barcelona and vice pres­i­dent of the Mo­bile World Cap­i­tal Barcelona, says he is not wor­ried about the event con­tin­u­ing in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal: “If the fair is doing well”, as has been the case so far, then the con­tract will be ex­tended “with­out any prob­lems”, he says. “The con­tracts are im­por­tant but it is even more so that things work out, and we are doing every­thing re­quired,” he adds.