The rise of Asian power at CES has Americans worried

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Although Las Vegas is a tourist city, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January every year attracts a large number of non-tourists to Las Vegas. The increasing number of CES attendees makes this bustling city that never sleeps even more crowded, so some people say that CES is getting bigger and bigger and it can't get any bigger.

The number of attendees at CES 2014 reached a record 160,000, and the sudden influx of people put pressure on the accommodation capacity of Las Vegas hotels. The number of attendees has been increasing year by year, but the number of hotel rooms in Las Vegas has not made significant progress. Most of the hotels in the city were built in the last century, and there is no room for expansion in the city. The 160,000 attendees alone have exceeded the number of hotel rooms in Las Vegas, which is about 150,000. Therefore, Bloomberg asked, where will the remaining 10,000 people stay?

Of course, the number of tourists and the number of hotels are not necessarily in a one-to-one ratio. Double rooms or family rooms can accommodate more people. However, the increasingly full hotel industry is just a microcosm of the contradiction between the size of the city and the number of tourists during CES. The CEA (Consumer Electronics Association), which hosts CES, said that the venue area of ​​CES 2015 is equivalent to 35 football fields. Such a large area is almost entirely filled with smartphones, TVs, smart watches, wearable devices and 3D printers.

CES has always had a great influence in the United States. In recent years, with the growth of Samsung and LG, the rise of Chinese Internet and technology companies, and the persistence of old Japanese companies, the influence of China, Japan and South Korea at CES has actually surpassed that of the United States. For example, last year, the largest exhibition halls were Samsung, LG and Sony, while Apple, Microsoft and Google did not set up exhibitions here, and HP and Dell did not promote them vigorously. As a result, a large number of Asian faces appeared at CES. In addition, some small domestic manufacturers flocked to CES and regarded participating in CES as a chance to gild themselves.

Facing these international friends who came from afar, CEA Vice President Karen Chupka said: "In order to ensure a good experience for participants, we strive to control the number of participants between 150,000 and 160,000 to ensure that everyone can participate freely and smoothly."

Perhaps seeing that Chinese companies are paying more and more attention to CES, CEA has considered holding an Asian version of CES in China. Karen Chupka said that they will hold CES Asia (Asia Consumer Electronics Show) in Shanghai in May this year to facilitate those enthusiastic Chinese and Asian manufacturers.

China has become the world's largest smartphone and PC market. Data shows that the proportion of CES attendees from Greater China reached 7% in 2014, while in 2010, the figure was only 4.7%.

So, whether Bloomberg lists the number of hotels or the number of attendees from China, it seems to imply that CES is crowded because of the Chinese. However, if we consider the 40 million or so tourists who visit Las Vegas each year, the fact that the hotels are not fully booked, and the fact that only 7% of the 160,000 attendees attend the conference, we can conclude that the Chinese who come here are not actually responsible for the so-called crowding.

Because Apple, Microsoft, and Google did not directly participate in the exhibition, while Chinese smartphone and PC manufacturers dominated the market in their own countries, they also began to expand into the international market. In addition, more and more Chinese companies participated in the investment of emerging American start-ups, such as Misfit. Therefore, the focus of CES in the past two years has shifted to Asia, while fields such as 3D printing, virtual reality, and wearable devices, which were mainly born in the United States, have not yet fully entered the mass market.

Because of the presence of Japanese and Korean giants and China's huge corporate group, some American commentators feel oppressed by the Asian power of CES, and this pattern is actually a concentrated reproduction of the international consumer electronics market. CEA's decision to start holding CES Asia in Shanghai is another example.

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