Three weeks
till EPCA in Monaco,
and already everyone's agendas are full. From breakfast meetings with
breakfast, pre-breakfast meetings, and standing breakfast meetings, each of the
three core days is staked out with hourly or half-hourly meetings. It's
speed-dating for the chemical industry.
If you're
being asked for a meeting at this late stage, you know you are distinctly B
list.
And if
you're still looking for a hotel room in Monaco, well you are clean out of
luck. One of Julia's German contacts told her that his company would not be
attending the conference because hotel rooms were a minimum of €800/night ($1,172 or £649) and in the current business climate
this would be sending out just the wrong kind of signals.
Another non-delegate
told me he was having to pay €900/night in the Fairmont
because all the Societe de Bains de Mer hotels inside Monte Carlo had been tied up by EPCA for
delegates. It was that or stay 17 km (11 miles) away in Nice.
So what are
the key issues we'll be discussing in all these dawn-to-dusk meetings, apart
from the economic doom and gloom ahead? One olefins industry player told Nel
he'd have a few things to get off his chest, such as this year's "farces majeures"
(sic).
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