Automechanika Johannesburg will see a return to a face-to-face trade show when it takes place at the Johannesburg Expo Centre, Nasrec, from 7-10 June 2022. This will be the seventh time that the world-renowned Automechanika expo for the automotive aftermarket will be staged in South Africa.

The four-day event, which is the biggest of its kind on the African continent, will be co-located with Futuroad Expo, sub-Saharan Africa’s leading professional exhibition for the truck, bus, and commercial vehicle industries.

“We are excited to host the automotive aftermarket industry at this event. As Automechanika events around the world resume, we have seen an unprecedented level of interest from both exhibitors and visitors, highlighting the fact that face-to-face platforms like these are important platforms for trade professionals, to network, increase brand awareness and to generate leads,” explains Michael Dehn, the recently-appointed Managing Director of Messe Frankfurt South Africa. 

“Messe Frankfurt, the German-based company has built up the Automechanika brand to world prominence in its field, and has learned a great deal over the past two years in terms of reimagining its products and restructuring accordingly to deal with vastly changed circumstances in the global exhibition industry.” explains Dehn.

The biannual Automechanika Johannesburg has proved, since 2009, that it is the ideal meeting place for industry peers and a place for exhibitors to build both their supplier and customer bases. Almost 150 B2B meetings were held during the 2019 Automechanika Johannesburg trade show.

There will be an array of new product launches, with both local and international companies exhibiting the latest product innovations and technologies of interest to not only after aftermarket sales stores and those in the automotive service and maintenance sectors, but also to those working at motor dealerships and related businesses.

“Training and education have become increasingly prominent features of Automechanika trade fairs globally and South Africa is no exception. In fact, these opportunities are widely promoted as major benefits of attending the trade fair at Nasrec,” said Dehn. 

“The automotive aftermarket environment is changing faster than never before with the introduction of recent technologies, particularly electrification and this makes employee training and education critical building blocks for businesses operating in a vastly different manner to which they were accustomed for so many years.”

Messe Frankfurt’s Automechanika brand has a history that now stretches back 51 years to 1971 when the first of these trade fairs for the automotive aftermarket was held in Frankfurt.