TEKNOKU.me – After being left behind by the participants one by one, the telecommunications world event of the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2020) event was finally canceled.
This was announced by the organizer, GSMA, who said that the cancellation of the MWC 2020 was motivated by a coronavirus outbreak.
“Global concerns about the coronavirus outbreak, travel restrictions, and other circumstances prevent GSMA from being able to organize it,” the global mobile operators association said in a statement.
GSMA was originally rumored to be holding a meeting on Friday tomorrow to determine the fate of the event which was planned to be held on February 24-27 in Barcelona, Spain.
The meeting was accelerated to become Wednesday, following a wave of cancellations from participants who kept coming up.
Previously, a number of big names such as Nokia, ZTE, Vivo, Sony, Vodafone, NTT, Intel, Facebook, Nvidia, LG, Amazon, Ericsson, and others have announced they will be absent from MWC 2020 for fear of the coronavirus outbreak.
MWC, which can gather hundreds of thousands of people from various countries, is feared to be a place for virus transmission, although the GSMA had said it would take preventive measures.
The MWC event is attended annually by no less than 100,000 visitors and thousands of companies. According to the GSMA, there were around 6,000 participants departing from China.
Although canceled for this year, the GSMA said the MWC will continue to be held in the following years.
“GSMA and the host city will continue to work together to realize MWC Barcelona 2021 and beyond,” added GSMA.
Coronavirus outbreaks have reached 42,000 cases of infection, most of them in China, with the death toll of more than 1,100 people. This new virus was detected in at least 25 countries around the world.