Many companies attend the international trade fair for various reasons. Some of these motives include marketing purposes where brand awareness could be created, obtaining new local and international suppliers, product testing, finding out about competition and business to business opportunities.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of the annual trade fair in the Kingdom of Swaziland and how it affects the Swazi economy. Even experts have faced a challenge in determining the effectiveness of these events, however, the firms are examined based on the number of years they have attended the exhibition, reasons behind attending the show and whether attending the show helps increase company profits or not.
All the firms are categorized into the country’s five major industries, food processing, textile, forest and wood pulp, tourism, sugar and the rest fall into other industries. Other reasons for this research include product consumption, investment and government expenditure. These components help determine if the economy of Swaziland will be affected after the fair.
The respondents of this study composed of 91 companies with 83 being valid. The firms were analyzed and grouped into their respective industries. This study has not been conducted before therefore, descriptive statistics was used on the responses given using SPSS and excel.
In this research, it was discovered that most companies who attended the 2017 annual trade fair are Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and most of them have been in business for over five years, also attended the fair to promote their companies. More than half of the respondents reported that they had profit increase after attending the trade fair.
Furthermore, to conclude if the economy is affected, product consumption increased for most firms who are on other industries mainly on local product consumption while profits also increased for more than half of the participants. Investment played a major role as many participants had an increase on investment expenditure. On the other hand, less than half of the respondents had an increase in exporting trade partners. With the results found, it was concluded that the country’s economy is affected mostly by other industries.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I
ABSTRACT II
LIST OF FIGURES IV
LIST OF TABLES V
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 MOTIVATION 1
1.1.1 Economic Impact of Trade Fairs 1
1.1.2 Socio-Cultural Impact of Trade Fairs 2
1.1.3 Importance of Trade Fairs 2
1.1.4 International Trade Fair in Swaziland 4
1.1.5 Problem Statement of the Study 5
1.2 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY 5
1.3 THE METHOD 6
1.4 FRAMEWORK 6
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW 8
2.1 HISTORY OF FAIRS 8
2.2 DEFINITION OF TRADE FAIR 9
2.2.1 Analysis of Difference between Trade Fair and Exhibitions 9
2.3 TYPES OF TRADE FAIR 10
2.3.1 Vertical and Horizontal Trade Fairs 11
2.3.2 Categorizing Fairs 11
2.4 BENEFITS OF TRADE FAIRS 12
2.4.1 Disadvantages of Trade Fairs 14
2.4.1.1 Expensive 15
2.4.1.2 Overcrowding 15
2.5 EFFECTIVENESS OF TRADE FAIRS 16
2.5.1 Promotion Mix and Marketing Objectives 16
2.5.2 Objectives of Trade Fairs (Organization) 17
2.6 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRADE FAIRS AND FIRMS 18
2.6.1 Importance of Small and Medium Enterprises 19
2.6.2 Why Small and Medium Enterprises attend Trade Fairs 20
2.6.3 Corporatoins andTrade Fairs 21
2.6.4Why Corporatoins attend Trade Fairs 22
2.7 HOW TRADE FAIRS AFFECT ECONOMY 23
2.7.1 Measuring Trade Fair Performance and Governmnet Influence 25
CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 27
3.1 SAMPLING METHOD AND PROCEDURE 27
3.2 QUESTIONNAIRE 28
3.3 QUESTIONNAIRE INCENTIVE 29
CHAPTER FOUR: DATA ANALYSIS 31
4.1 DATA PRESENTATION 31
4.2 FOOD PROCESSING INDUSTRY 31
4.3 TEXTILE INDUSTRY 33
4.4 FOREST AND WOOD PULP INDUSTRY 35
4.5 TOURISM INDUSTRY 36
4.6 OTHER INDUSTRIES 38
4.7 INDUSRTY PERSPECTIVE 40
CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION, LIMITATION AND SUGGESTION 48
5.1 FINDINGS 48
5.1.1 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 50
5.1.2 Comparison between corporation and SMEs 52
5.2 LIMITATIONS 54
5.3 RECOMMENDATIONS 54
REFERENCES 55
APPENDIX A 60

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