Posted on Monday, February 10 2020 @ 11:11 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Last week we heard that LG and ZTE decided to pull out and just before the weekend, NVIDIA send out a message that it won't be sending any employees to this year's event:
Given public health risks around the coronavirus, ensuring the safety of our colleagues, partners and customers is our highest concern.Similarly, Ericsson cancelled as well and now there's news that mobile heavy-weight Samsung is dialing back its MWC presence:
MWC Barcelona is one of the world’s most important technology conferences. We’ve been looking forward to sharing our work in AI, 5G and vRAN with the industry. We regret not attending, but believe this is the right decision.
The smartphone giant won't be sending as many executives to the world's largest mobile conference as in years past, but as of Friday, it still plans to attend.Chinese firms Oppo and Huawei are also taking precautions, by placing employees in an up to 14-days quarantine prior to the event.
Update February 10, 2020 @ 13:26
Sony also cancelled its MWC participation. Instead of going to the expo, the company will livestream its press conference via its Xperia YouTube channel.
Sony has been closely monitoring the evolving situation following the novel coronavirus outbreak, which was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization on January 30th, 2020.Additonally, there's also confirmation that Amazon will not attend MWC 2020.
As we place the utmost importance on the safety and wellbeing of our customers, partners, media and employees, we have taken the difficult decision to withdraw from exhibiting and participating at MWC 2020 in Barcelona, Spain.
The Sony press conference will now instead take place at the scheduled time of 8:30am (CET) on February 24, 2020 as a video via our official Xperia YouTube channel to share our exciting product news.
