Zoomark 2017 is the most important exhibition in Italy concerning the pet industry. It takes place every two years in Bologna and it ended a few weeks ago.

We’ve been waiting for the official numbers from the exhibition’s management before writing the editorial; there are a lot of percentages but still no definitive number.

Numbers of Zoomark 2017

But here on Reefs.com we are used to  fact checking and we’ve done our research. In 2015, according to Zoomark’s site (here), there were 22,299 registered attendees: 15,526 Italians and 6,773  foreigners. Thanks to the files sent by Zoomark we know that in 2017, there was an increase of about 36% for foreign guests, and was about 30% of the total number of guests. It’s easy to do the math. 6,773 turns into 9,211, and if that is 30% of the total, then the final value has to be about 30,704. But this is an approximation, because we know that the percentage is actually higher than 30%, but we don’t know if it’s about  35, 40, or 50%.

In the past, we’ve noticed that the number of attendees and exhibitors has been declining, but this year we were happy to see a contained recovery. There were still only a small number of aquatic exhibitors, but the public attendance was definitely up. We’ll see what happens in two years!

There were very few marine aquariums, while fresh water aquariums were absolutely more present. We liked very much the idea of the biotopes, and here upon you can see one of them, presented by Heiko Bleher and set up by Aquaristica.

Very nice: ITAU‘s corner with a big aquascaped tank, inspired by and created in honor of Takashi Amano.

The exhibitors in the aquatics section of Zoomark 2017

Now, we’ll take a quick look and some of the booths at the show.

Sicce-Seachem

The combined  Sicce-Seachem booth was definitely one of the most interesting at the exhibition, thanks also to the new electric pumps by sicce and the Tidal filter by Seachem, which are gathering a lot of success.

Tunze

tunze‘s booth presented an incredible number of products. We are currently writing our review about their Smart Controller 7000 and Stream 3.

Amtra

Amtra is the aquarist division of the huge Croci brand; during Zoomark 2017, we learned that they have a plan in place for its recovery. In fact, starting this year Amtra‘s executive director will be Davide Robustelli , who has had great success with Gaia. So, good luck to Amtra and Davide. We’ll have the chance to talk about this again.

Aquaristica

Spectacular as usual, the booth of Aquaristica, which presented a lot of new products, including aquariums, their biotope project, and the full range of Rossmont pumps. And don’t forget the food by Dottor Bassleer, of which we are big fans.

Prodac

Prodac‘s booth was majestic and contained a lot of new products and packages. We like seeing an Italian company that invests in the aquarist world and cares about the needs of its costumers.

Aqualighter

Very interesting was the Ukrainian Aqualighter. There were many cunning products that we’ll have to talk about, both for big and small aquariums. There was also a revolutionary product that prevents the growth of the algae on the glass.

OceanLife

Zoomark 2017 saw the return of OceanLife after many editions. The big aquarium dedicated to aquascaping was theirs.

Mantovani Pet Diffusion

Mantovani Pet Diffusion had an enormous booth; they are the Italian supplier of the Red Sea brand.

ReeFlowers

There was also ReeFlowers, a Turkish brand that we hadn’t seen before. It looks very good; the packaging is very beautiful and the choice of products is very wide. We will try to get some of their products to test in the future, but for now, we wish them good luck in their adventures in the Italian market.

Fengxin Zhongle Aquarium Co. LTD.

Here are some Chinese booths. Pictured above is Fengxin Zhongle Aquarium Co. LTD.

Tzong Yang Aquarium co. Ltd.

Tetra

The Tetra booth showed some small set-up aquariums, among which was a nice Minions aquarium. Minions? Yes, you read that right 🙂

Surely it was dedicated to the children.

Another tiny aquarium by Tetra.

And a bigger one on show in the hall:

Family Pet

Here the booth of Family Pet, featuring the Euraquarium brand of which you can see an interesting fresh water aquarium.

Petra Aqua

This year’s Zoomark even had the importer and wholesaler Petra Aqua, from the Czech Republic.

Finally, we visited the last two booths in which we were interested.

Aquatlantis

The first was Aquatlantis‘s booth, a Portuguese builder of aquariums, LED lights, and more.

Zoolux

And last but not least Zoolux, with JBL and Ocean Nutritions brands.

Conclusion

Two years ago (in our previous editorial) we wrote: “So even this year we have to say that if this tendency will be confirmed again probably the aquarist part of the Zoomark could even be cancelled due to the lack of exhibitors and interest, and we have already written it in the editorial of two years ago. We obviously hope that it’s not going to happen, and that the management of the exhibition would plan another way to proceed, involving many companies to participate. We have a lot of ideas in order to improve the exhibition, in case they one day will contact us for an opinion.”

But as we have said in the opening, after almost 10 years the tendency has changed a little with more guests.
It was very interesting to see Aqua Project with the  ITAU‘s booth on show. The packaging of Heiko Bleher and ITAU were very nice. There were few companies of international relevance and the number of the aquaristic companies was very low, but the situation is changing and we have better expectations for the next editions.

In any case we’re going to deepen our look at the contents of the booths that we consider most interesting. You can find below a list of all the articles that we’ll be publishing in the next days!

Feel free to ask anything in the comments.

The booths:

• SDC pumps at sicce’s booth and Seachem booth
• tunze’s booth with a plethora of products on show
• Amtra booth with Davide Robustelli’s new class
• Aquaristica booth with biotopes and some interesting news
• ReeFlowers comes to Italy for the first time
• The Prodac booth and a new garlic feed
• AquaLighter – Collar with NanoClear and more
• OceanLife with Balling, Pro Experts and others
• Aquatlantis and jellyfish aquariums
• The beautiful MiniOceanario (also in video even in 4K)

(Translated by Agnese Poggi)