Mobile World Congress is waiting for a thread due to the coronavirus

Everything points to the Mobile World Congress 2020 in Barcelona will not be held. Following the withdrawal of Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Rakuten, NTT Docomo, Nokia, McAfee and VIVO, the thing looks bad. The event organizers, the GSMA, have met urgently today, advancing a meeting scheduled for Friday. Everything indicates that by losing many of the great speakers, the event at least will be postponed for the coronavirus.

They add up to big companies like Intel, NVIDIA, Sony, Amazon, Cisco or Ericsson, among others, who have been unsubscribed since this weekend. Things are getting more and more complicated and at the moment the assembly activity has come to a standstill. Now the organizers are meeting to make a decision.

Update 15.10: GSMA announces that the Mobile World Congress is not being canceled or postponed for now.

Update 14.30: Vodafone also announces its withdrawal, making the event even more complicated.

Update 20.00: GSMA announces the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress due to the coronavirus

The organizers of the Mobile World Congress have finally decided to cancel the event due to the significant cancellation of attendees. Some of the main exhibitors have been backing down these days before a possible contagion by coronavirus.

It should be noted that the GSMA that organizes the event is made up of 26 telephone companies. Among the most important are Telefónica, Orange, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Telenor, Verizon, NTT Docomo, AT&T and Turkcell (those that have announced their absence prior to cancellation in bold)

The decision has come after being announced by British Telecom, Rakuten and Nokia they will not attend. These are just the ones who announced today that they would not attend the Barcelona event. So finally the event is officially canceled and we do not know what will happen with events such as Computex or CeBIT, which are held in summer.

Mobile World Congress pending a thread due to the coronavirus

At the moment it is not clear what will happen, but everything points to a suspension due to the large number of casualties. All because of the coronavirus originating in China, despite the fact that we are thousands of kilometers from the origin of the infection. The latest data on this pathology would have led to this decision.

It seems that attendees at the Mobile World Congress they prefer not to risk the safety of workers. Although it should be noted that the GSMA has applied important measures to prevent any type of contagion. Despite all these additional measures, attendees do not seem willing to take risks.

The Barcelona City Council, the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Government of Spain insist that there is no risk. They also highlight that measures have been and will be taken to avoid possible infections. The main measure is that anyone who has been to China or Asia this February will not be able to access.

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