Nesco

My two cents on the recent discussion here about NESCO exhibition business going zero and turning into (about) a REIT:

  1. NESCO, even currently, have much much higher exhibition space than the new JIO World Centre. With the slated expansion, NESCO exhibition space would be more than 6 times of JWC.

  2. JWC has huge (largest in India till date) Convention Centre. However, convention and exhibition are two very different genres of the larger MICE industry. They appear similar, but have very different clients. IMHO, convention is a lower margin business (20-30%), whereas exhibition commands margins as high as 70%. Anyways NESCO was never in conventions, so no effect whatsoever.

  3. Location of NESCO is quite far away from JWC and hence cater to quite different audience. Moreover, in the greater Mumbai region, NESCO is more centralised than JWC.

  4. In developed countries like Germany, China, Canada, US, etc. (in that order), large cities have more than 4-5 large expo centres. So India’s financial capital can easily have 3-4 centres.

For me, the main attraction of NESCO is it’s niche exhibition venue business, which is high margin and a BIG moat.

Disclosure: invested and an exhibition professional

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