We analysed 90,651 exhibitor listings. Nine in ten companies never exhibit twice
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We analysed 90,651 exhibitor listings. Nine in ten companies never exhibit twice
2026-08-21·Research note·8 min read
In a corpus of 90,651 exhibitor listings drawn from 734 trade<br>show editions, 91.2% of the 77,573 distinct companies appear at exactly one<br>show. Take the 108 editions with 50 or more exhibitors and compare every pair<br>of distinct shows: 82.5% of those pairs share literally zero companies, and the<br>median Jaccard overlap is 0.000.
We expected a trade show circuit — a recognisable population of companies<br>that works a run of events every year. It is not there. Below is the number,<br>the query that produced it, the independent check that made us believe it, and<br>the several ways it could still be wrong.
The one-and-done number
Normalising on the lowercased, trimmed company name, the corpus has 77,573<br>distinct companies. 9,463 of them (12.2%) appear at two or more editions.<br>But editions are not shows: IMEX Frankfurt 2022, 2023 and 2024 are three rows in<br>events, so a company that shows up every year looks like a repeat<br>exhibitor without ever having attended a second event. Collapsing editions into<br>show families by stripping the year out of the event name:
WITH fam AS (<br>SELECT id, LOWER(TRIM(REPLACE(REPLACE(name,'2024',''),'2025',''))) AS f<br>FROM events<br>), n AS (<br>SELECT LOWER(TRIM(x.company)) AS c,<br>COUNT(DISTINCT x.event_id) AS editions,<br>COUNT(DISTINCT fam.f) AS families<br>FROM exhibitors x JOIN fam ON fam.id = x.event_id<br>GROUP BY 1<br>SELECT COUNT(*) AS companies, -- 77573<br>SUM(editions >= 2) AS repeat_editions, -- 9463<br>SUM(families >= 2) AS repeat_shows -- 6860<br>FROM n;
2,603 of the 9,463 apparent repeat exhibitors (27.5%) never attended a<br>second distinct show; they attended the same show in more than one year.<br>Genuine cross-show repeats are 6,860 companies, 8.8% of 77,573. Normalising on<br>registered domain instead — stricter, but only applicable to the 26,216 rows<br>(28.9%) that carry one — gives 23,440 distinct domains of which 1,870 (8.0%)<br>appear at two or more editions. Two different normalisations, same order of<br>magnitude.
The check: 82.5% of show pairs share nothing
Company-level counts are only as good as the name normalisation, so we ran<br>an independent test that does not depend on any single company resolving<br>correctly. Take the 108 editions holding 50 or more rows, build the set of<br>normalised exhibitor names for each, and compute pairwise Jaccard over the<br>5,735 pairs that are not two editions of the same show.
Pairwise overlap, 5,735 distinct-show pairsValue
Pairs sharing zero exhibitors4,734 (82.5%)<br>Pairs sharing 20 or more exhibitors48 (0.84%)<br>Median Jaccard0.000<br>p90 Jaccard0.0008<br>p99 Jaccard0.0105<br>Max Jaccard0.937
Jaccard overlap between exhibitor sets, editions with ≥50 rows
Name normalisation errors inflate the number of pairs that appear to share<br>nothing, so treat 82.5% as an upper bound. But the p99 is 0.0105: even at the<br>99th percentile, two large shows in this corpus have one exhibitor in common<br>per hundred. Whatever is driving that is not a spelling problem, because a<br>spelling problem would have to be nearly universal to move a distribution that<br>far.
The tail is where it gets interesting
The 48 pairs that do overlap heavily are not a gentle continuation of the<br>distribution; they are a different phenomenon. The maximum, at Jaccard 0.937:
Edition AEdition BSharedJaccard
White Label World Expo (136)White Label Expo UK (139)1330.937<br>EUROGUSS, Germany (722)NürnbergMesse Austria (644)4470.486<br>Beauty Istanbul 2024 (1,210)BEAUTYISTANBUL 2025 (983)5090.302<br>Spring Fair, UK (676)Autumn Fair, UK (322)1060.119<br>Integrated Systems Europe (1,751)InfoComm, US (855)2250.094
Highest-overlap pairs of distinctly-named editions
White Label World Expo and White Label Expo UK share 133 companies out of<br>136 and 139 — 98% of the smaller list. Those are two separately branded,<br>separately marketed, separately ticketed events with essentially one exhibitor<br>roster. Some of the others are our own deduplication failing (Beauty Istanbul<br>2024 and BEAUTYISTANBUL 2025 are the same show and our year-stripping heuristic<br>missed the capitalisation change, which is exactly the kind of error we said to<br>expect). Others are real: EUROGUSS and NürnbergMesse's Austrian edition share<br>447 companies because the same operator runs both. Spring Fair and Autumn Fair<br>share 106 because they are the same UK giftware show twice a year under<br>different names.
So the shape is: a very large population of companies that exhibits once, a<br>negligible middle, and a small number of event pairs that are functionally the<br>same event sold twice. That is a more specific and more useful claim than<br>"exhibitors don't repeat".
Why this is a lower bound, and by how much
The obvious objection is coverage. If we hold 382 editions with data and the<br>world has tens of thousands, then a company exhibiting at two shows will look<br>one-and-done...