The Geneva Motor Show is ditching Europe for Qatar as the global jet set looks east

Good morning from Geneva.

Go east or die. For some of Europe’s businesses and conferences, it is increasingly becoming a reality.

Last week, the Geneva International Motor Show (GIMS), which turned 100 years old this February announced that its centennial event in Geneva was also its last in the Swiss city.

For decades, GIMS was part of the auto industry’s big four events, alongside the shows in Detroit, Frankfurt, and Paris. Now, only its brand name will survive, as the organizers said they’ll set up shop in Qatar, after closing the books in Switzerland. Further east, Beijing Auto Show and Auto Shanghai are now the world’s largest car fairs.

Why did GIMS adapt and die? Caught between a post-COVID drop in car sales, a decline in European car manufacturing, and the rise of Asia, Geneva no longer had a unique appeal as a location. The Tribune de Genève, a local newspaper, noted that car manufacturers presented only 13 new models during Geneva’s last show, compared to 117 at the Beijing motor show.

So far, Geneva’s other major mobility show, EBACE, which gathers the global private jet industry, has been holding on to its European home base, as I witnessed firsthand last week. I moderated a panel of executives from several European and American electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft on hybrid and electric flying.

But even for the companies catering to the global jet set, Asia is becoming ever more relevant—and Europe less so. For most of the companies I spoke to, the Middle East is either their number one or two market. And Klaus Roewe, the CEO of German electric jet maker Lilium, said he typically ordered his battery chargers from China: “It’s a commodity,” he told me.

However, a day after the conference ended, news surfaced that EBACE, too, is considering relocating elsewhere.

Individually, local news reports like these may seem trivial: Does it really matter whether a small, wealthy, landlocked European city such as Geneva loses one or two of its global industry conferences?

But the bigger picture is one in which Europe’s economy is losing ground, its population is aging, and its leading companies most often bank on 20th-century innovations. In that sense, the demise of Europe's business conferences is just the canary in the coal mine.

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Peter Vanham
peter.vanham@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com