As it does every year, the Tokyo Nano Tech Expo has started the nanotech conference season off with an impressive event.
Japan’s nano tech 2009 conference covers the entire nano marketplace and creates a place where big worldwide players in this space can meet at Tokyo Big Sight by concurrently holding five related industry-specific exhibitions:
- Nano Bio Expo 2009: Exhibition uniting biotechnology, nanotechnology and business,
- ASTEC2009 & METEC’09: Specialist exhibition for surface technology, treatment and processing.
- Neo-functional material 2009, exhibition for electronics and printing materials,
- Convertech JAPAN 2009 for converting industry,
- Printable Electronics 2009, the exhibition of printing-technology contribute materially to the development of electronics
The expo featured 522 exhibiting businesses occupying 884 booths: 324 were Japanese companies, while 198 businesses came from 23 foreign countries. The second biggest exhibitor was Germany with 35 companies of the likes of Bayer Material Science, BYK-Chemie and Clariant.
Canada had four exhibitors, two companies (Surfasys Inc, and Tekna Plasma Systems), and two provincial research programs: NanoQuebec, NanoAlberta and National Institute of Nanotechnology (Alberta).
The overall theme of the exhibition was “Green Nanotechnologies” which covered everything from environmental and renewable energy applications to environmentally friendly electronics and construction materials.
Interesting to note that most of the participants were government-sponsored institutions and universities; very few start-ups outside of Japan were participating this year. Hopefully, we’ll see more of them at nanotx USA 2009. The lineup of companies is already very promising.
George is a Schulich MBA student working at MaRS as a Market Research Analyst in Healthcare/Biotech for the Market Readiness Program.
