Interview with the IFA boss: "Nobody in the industry wanted a second CeBIT"

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Troubled times lie behind Germany's leading trade fair for consumer electronics and household appliances. IFA is celebrating its centenary this year and is under new management. Following the rift with the trade fair company and the arrival of an international partner, the new management wants to steer the trade fair back into calmer waters.

Industry veteran and former Samsung manager Leif Linder has been at the helm of IFA since October 2023. He wants to reposition the trade fair, which has committed itself to Berlin for another ten years, and make it fit for the future. heise online met Leif Lindner in the capital for an interview.

heise online: Mr. Lindner, there are now just a few days to go until IFA, which is a special one. You are celebrating 100 years of IFA. What can we expect?

Leif Lindner: A superlative event to mark 100 years, because after all we have a lot to celebrate. There are not many trade fairs that are so old, that have so much history. Although I don't really want to use the word "old".

We are not only celebrating the last 100 years in retrospect, but also a new beginning, a new start, a new direction. We are also taking this into account with our new branding. Our new logo, our new colors – is the new visual language that people perceive from us. This extends from the website to the app and what you see at the trade fair itself.

This year, people will also recognize that IFA is not just a technology innovation show, but also entertainment and an experience. IFA is a cultural event and that is also our direction for the future. Today, a modern trade fair format must be a cultural event if it wants to have a raison d'être and prospects.

You mentioned it: It's a new beginning. It is your first IFA. If we look ahead: What are you doing differently from your predecessors? How do you want to develop IFA further?

Yes, to answer that in a sustainable way, you have to know how this constellation actually came about. Why am I here and not someone else? Basically, as you may remember, Messe Berlin handed over the IFA and this was mainly due to pressure from the industry.

It's a special situation that doesn't exist in many industries. The trademark rights holder of IFA is the GFU, which in turn represents the 22 most important manufacturers. I was still at Samsung at the time, so I was still on the industry side and on the supervisory board.

We from the industry said together that the IFA had to change significantly in order to be prepared for the future and to remain a point of contact for major international corporations. Having worked in one myself, I knew that a dusty image could become a problem and nobody in the industry wanted a second CeBIT.

That was the initial situation. When I helped push for change back then, I didn't know that I would be the one in the driver's seat and no longer a passenger or outsider.

We have to take the IFA to a different, contemporary level. That doesn't mean that my predecessors have all done a bad job. On the contrary, you have to manage 100 years first. If you look at the history of the last 100 years, there were many milestones where products were shown for the first time worldwide at IFA.

And let me just briefly mention that we are also showing this history in an exhibition that was first at Bikini Berlin and is moving to the Palais am Funkturm for IFA. There will also be ten works of art by local Berlin artists on the subject of electronics.

Ultimately, the aim is to address the industry's trending topics. To ensure that we are a showcase for innovations, but also that we are relevant outside our industry. We want IFA to become more of an experience again, to appeal to younger target groups.

This is also reflected in the branding, we have already changed the logo quite a bit. However, this touch of history remains, because we still have the so-called "Funk-Otto". The image of this head will continue to be used on certain areas, because we are of course proud of our history, but also with a wink that we are evolving.

This year, for example, we also have the AI Summit curated by Handelsblatt, where we welcome both political key opinion leaders and people from outside our industry. That's the direction we want to take. Everyone has something to do with electronics. Content needs playback devices, AI needs playback devices and we are made for that.

This means that IFA remains a trade fair for the general public and continues to perform this balancing act, which – You mentioned CeBIT – has always been the subject of discussion at CeBIT. Is this now a clear commitment to the consumer show and is the industry also going down this path?

Yes, both times yes. It is a clear commitment to the uniqueness of IFA, that it is and remains a B2B and B2C trade fair.

We have of course looked at the figures, the visitor flows. Would it make sense to set up a single trade visitor day, for example? How do we assess the fact that trade fairs like ITB no longer have a public day? In principle, we have a public and B2B day every day.

We interviewed the 50 most important exhibitors after the trade fair last year. How do you see the trade fair? What is the focus? Almost all of them responded and we can therefore say with a fair degree of certainty what is expected of us.

There are customers who are focused on business contacts and less on the public, and there are also some who are primarily interested in how many media and retailers come here. But the absolute majority are behind this concept of addressing both. That's why we're sticking to it, because it also sets us apart from others.

Speaking of retailers and other trade fairs, how do you position IFA in comparison to other major technology events such as CES in the USA?

I found it interesting when I spoke to major exhibitors from Asia, even outside of the protocol. They told me that one of IFA's great strengths over CES is that it brings together the major retailers.

You could say: wait a minute, CES does that too. But Germany is a special market in the electronics sector – for LG or Samsung, for example, and increasingly also for the Chinese –. With 80 million inhabitants, this may not be immediately obvious. But since Germans are very critical buyers, you can say that if you succeed in Germany, you will succeed in all countries. Germany is strategically important. That's why IFA is important and, from our point of view, has no alternative.

In addition, the CES focuses strongly on the automotive sector and is the most important automotive trade fair in the USA since the Detroit Motor Show no longer exists. In Germany, we have the strong IAA. So we can't really focus on the automotive sector. We also have a strong Gamescom here, while the major US gaming trade fair E3 no longer exists.

In other words, it makes no sense to be a copy of CES; on the contrary, our strengths are that we curate our trade fair strategically. So we don't have a mix in the stands. First and foremost, we want to present product worlds so that there is a clear route for consumers and trade visitors.

But of course we will also be focusing more on mobility and gaming. In addition to classic consumer electronics, we also have a very fast-growing area such as beauty tech and digital health. We are also playing the hi-fi theme again, as this has been very neglected in recent years

This year we have taken the next step, but these topics will also become bigger in the coming years. And I think our strength is that we literally have one of the most important stages in the world with the city of Berlin in the background.

Is the trade fair fully booked now or do you still have room for improvement?

We are as good as fully booked. We have moved the Global Markets, i.e. an entire hall, back to Station Berlin. If they were still in Hall 9, we would be overbooked. So we are very satisfied with the booking result. I also think it's good that we were able to win one or two people back.

One or two big exhibitors have been missing over the past two years. I'm thinking of Sony, for example.

Sony is here. And Sony is also bigger than before. I've been to Japan twice to talk to them about it. And Sony Germany has a new president who thinks what we are doing is very good. Sony will also be present in the photo sector at IFA. Focused on influencers and creatives, i.e. more on a pointed target group on the subject of content creation, but at least that's a next step. And we won't let up and are already working on next year.