A Guide to BPI Europe for First-Time Exhibitors
BioProcess International Europe is the European edition of Informa Connect's BioProcess International series, and the 2027 edition runs 27–29 April 2027 at the Congress Center Hamburg. It is a conference and exhibition covering biologics and advanced therapy manufacturing, structured around five conference tracks — cell line development and engineering, cell culture and upstream processing, downstream processing, ATMP development and manufacturing, and digital biomanufacturing and data-driven operations — with three full-day workshops running before the main programme opens.
One point of history matters when you plan. The show alternates its host city. It was held at the CCH in Hamburg in 2025, moved to Vienna for 2026, and returns to the CCH for 2027. If you are working from notes made at the Vienna edition, the venue, the access arrangements and the freight route have all changed. If you are working from the 2025 edition in Hamburg, you are in the right building.
Who Exhibits at BPI Europe and What Visitors Want
The exhibit floor is populated by suppliers to the biomanufacturing process rather than by manufacturers of finished medicines: single-use systems and assemblies, bioreactors and upstream hardware, chromatography and filtration media, cell culture media and raw materials, process analytics and sensors, automation and process-control software, and contract development and manufacturing organisations selling capacity.
The visitor is a process development scientist, an MSAT or manufacturing science engineer, a CMC or regulatory lead, or someone from a CDMO's technical business development team. They are technically literate to a degree that is unusual on a trade fair floor, and they arrive with a specific problem — a titre they cannot lift, a purification step that will not scale, a viral vector process whose cost of goods makes the therapy unviable. They are not browsing a category. They are looking for something that addresses the problem they came in with, which means the fastest thing you can do for them is state plainly what yours does and at what scale it has been shown to work.
The Conference Rhythm — Why This Is Not a Trade Fair Floor
At an exhibition centre, visitor traffic is broadly continuous through the opening hours and a stand can afford to reveal itself slowly. At a conference, the exhibit hall is a function of the timetable. While sessions are running the hall is quiet. When a block ends, the hall fills within a couple of minutes and empties again when the next session starts. Coffee and lunch breaks are when your show happens, and they are short.
Three design consequences follow. First, frontage beats depth: during a break, few people will commit to walking into an enclosed space, so an open stand that can be read and entered from the aisle outperforms a deeper one of the same area. Second, you need parallel conversation capacity rather than a single point of contact, because a queue during a twenty-minute break is a queue that dissolves rather than waits. Third, your primary message needs to survive being read at four or five metres by someone holding a coffee — which is a different test from a message designed to be read once someone has already stopped.
The compensating advantage is that the people in the hall are the same people who were in the sessions. There is very little casual footfall to filter out. A conversation on this floor is far more likely to be with someone who can specify or buy than the equivalent conversation at a general trade fair.
Stand Size: Choosing Between 9, 18, 24 and 45 Square Metres
Nine square metres works for a consumables, reagent or analytics supplier whose product is physically small and whose objective is to be present, be findable and have conversations with people who already know the brand. You get a counter, a back wall and standing conversations. In burst traffic, expect a nine-square-metre stand to be able to hold roughly two conversations at once before it feels full.
Eighteen square metres is the first size where you can separate a display area from a conversation area, and it is where most suppliers exhibiting seriously for the first time should start. It gives you a wide enough frontage to be read from the aisle and room for three or four people to be on the stand without blocking each other.
Twenty-four square metres is the threshold at which a semi-private corner becomes practical — somewhere a CDMO conversation about capacity or a technical discussion about a specific process can happen without being overheard by the person waiting behind. On this floor, where the discussion is often about a client's unpublished process, that privacy has real commercial value.
At 45 square metres you can run a proper meeting room and still keep an open frontage working the aisle, which is the combination most CDMOs and major system suppliers need. From 60 square metres upward you can add a small presentation area, which pays for itself here specifically because the post-session overflow gives you an audience that is already primed.
What a BPI Europe Stand Costs by Size
Ranges below are all-in for design, fabrication, graphics, domestic freight, install and dismantle. They exclude the floor space rental you pay to the organiser and the electrical and rigging orders placed with the venue. Note that the same floor area costs less here than at a machinery show, because there is no serviced equipment engineering in the build.
- 9 m² modular: €4,100–€8,700
- 18 m² modular: €4,800–€10,100
- 24 m² modular: €11,500–€15,000
- 24 m² custom with a semi-private corner: €11,500–€15,000
- 45 m² custom with an enclosed meeting room: €18,300–€24,800
- 60 m²+ premium with a presentation area: €34,000–€44,000
Common Mistakes, in Order of Frequency
The most common is designing for continuous footfall — a deep stand with a narrow entrance that works at a Messe and strangles you during a twenty-minute break. The second is stripping the technical content out of the graphics on generic trade fair advice, on a floor where the audience actively wants data and rewards it. The third is treating the CCH as though it were an exhibition hall, and discovering at the loading bay that the largest component does not fit the access route. The fourth is under-staffing: a stand sized for parallel conversations that only has one person on it converts no better than a stand half the size. The fifth is scheduling the build without reference to the conference programme, so the stand is still being finished while the first session block your team is presenting in has already emptied into the hall. All five are settled at design stage or not at all.
Getting Started
Send your stand size, your stand number if Informa Connect has issued it, and a short description of what you intend to demonstrate — whether that is a physical assembly people should handle, a screen-based process model, or simply data on a wall. Tell us as well whether anyone from your team is presenting and in which session block. You get a 3D design and an itemised all-in quote, at no charge and with no obligation.
Because the host city alternates, a structure that packs flat and can be re-graphicked is a better purchase here than a one-off build tied to a single floor plan — the frame stays in our Frankfurt warehouse between editions and the next city costs a graphics refresh rather than a rebuild. Our modular exhibition stands are built for exactly that pattern.
