Mobile World Congress 2025 in 7 figures

The most important event in the world of telecommunications and technology will once again put Barcelona in the global spotlight, with a new edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), which will be held between March 3 and 6 at the Gran Via venue of the Barcelona Fair. In addition, this year it will also feature the Talento Arena, an extension of the congress located in the Montjuïc venue with top-notch speakers from the world's leading technology companies and organized by Mobile World Capital Barcelona.

This Monday, the Catalan capital will dress up for the 19th time. The city will once again become the meeting point for the world's leading powers in terms of technology, in which artificial intelligence (AI) will once again be the protagonist, in a congress that is no longer just a showcase for the world's most important technology companies.gadgetsThe MWC 2025 is not just a curious event, but the centre of the debate about what we have, what we can have and where we want to go, technologically and ethically speaking. During the week, Barcelona will be the scene of large gatherings of executives in suits and with a badge hanging around their necks; for a few days, English will predominate in the streets and public transport will be smoking. It will also be a good time for hotels, restaurants and the endless services and leisure that the city can offer and make a second August. This will be the MWC 2025, summarized in 7 figures and annotation.

The GSMA, the telecommunications association that organises the event, has already announced that it expects this year's event to exceed or "at least" match last year's figures, which attracted 101,000 visitors. However, last year's forecasts of 95,000 visitors were far exceeded, and this year's figures are expected to be the same. Furthermore, at a time when thewar between China and the USWith AI being the order of the day, a significant number of congressmen from Asia are expected, in line with recent years.

The figure of 101,000 is still far from the historic record of visitors to Mobile, which was in 2019, when 109,000 attendees were reached.

Given the large influx of international visitors, airlines have increased their offer at Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport by 9.8% this week compared to Mobile last year, and there are more than 1.7 million seats scheduled on more than 9,000 flights from Friday 28 February to Sunday 9 March.

In addition to the planes, road transport has also been reinforced. Ferrocarriles de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC) will double the capacity of the trains, going from three to six cars, and will increase by 30 daily runs on L8 of the Llobregat-Anoia line due to the Mobile World Congress (MWC).

However, it is already expected that traffic in the city these days will not be placid. The already usualFight between taxi drivers and VTC will continue to be present, and, in fact, the majority association of drivers with VTC licenses, Unauto, has called a strike between 8 and 12 on Monday morning, coinciding with the first day of Mobile "in view of the evidence that the Generalitat, in collusion with Elite Taxi, has decided to wipe the sector off the map in Catalonia."

The event will feature 2,700 world-renowned companies including Huawei, Samsung, Meta and Google, showcasing innovations such as robots, transparent displays and flying devices. First-time exhibitors include Alibaba Cloud, China Unicom, Databricks, Indra, KDDI Spherience, Kyocera, Liberty Global, Siemens, SquareTrade, Tencent Cloud, TransUnion and Ubiquiti.

In addition, there will be a conference programme with 1,200 internationally renowned speakers and 180 delegations from 140 countries under the motto "Converge. Connect. Create". The conferences will be spread across 19 stages throughout the venue over the four days of the congress.

The Generalitat is also participating, once again, in the Mobile World Congress with the aim of "projecting Catalonia as a European benchmark and a key player in technological sovereignty on the continent, a driver of technological and digital innovation that drives progress and economic growth", which creates highly qualified employment and transforms society. In this edition, the Government will offer an immersive experience to show the four axes on which Catalonia's positioning as one of the most important European countries is based. hub Europe's technological and digital sector. A total of 46 companies will participate, which will be added to the 52 start-ups Catalans of the 4YFN.

The Barcelona Hotel Association strongly applauds the event and has stated that the organisation has reserved 21,000 rooms for them, 1,000 more than last year. However, the figure is still below the 25,000 that the GSMA reserved before the pandemic. To these must be added the rooms that are reserved directly for the congress attendees, without the MWC organisation as an intermediary.

As for the expected economic impact for the city, the GSMA is not betting on it and expects it to be similar to last year's, between 540 and 550 million euros. However, until the last day of the congress, the organisers and the Fira will not give more specific figures.

New faces at the helm

The congress signed a contract with the administrations to be in Barcelona until 2030, a period that will be automatically renewed if all parties agree to do so. To comply with the agreement, the governments committed to increasing contributions to the world technology congress from 15 to 24 million. However, for the moment all parties seem satisfied with Barcelona as host. In fact, this will be the last edition of the MWC with Mats Granryd as director general of the GSMA, but the director has already assured that this does not shake "the commitment to Barcelona".

The GSMA also faces another change: its president until now was José María Álvarez-Pallete, former president of Telefónica, who after histeleoperator exitIn mid-January, he also left his post at the GSMA. The new president of Telefónica, Marc Murtra, will join the board of the association, but the institution will not name a new president until after the MWC.