Mobile World Congress for this year has been canceled. The event was scheduled to take place from February 24 to February 27 in Barcelona, Spain, but now the GSM Association (GSMA), which organizes MWC has decided to cancel it because of fears over the coronavirus outbreak.
This is the first time GSMA is canceling the yearly event since the first edition of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2006. The GSMA says it is looking forward to hosting MWC 2021 in Barcelona.
John Hoffman, the CEO of organiser GSMA in a statement said “The GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event.”
Now after MWC event has been cancelled, it is expected that all the companies which withdrew from MWC will introduce their new devices in separate events sometime later.
Just yesterday, HMD Global pulled out of this year MWC due to coronavirus outbreak. Recently, Facebook, AT&T, Sprint and Cisco also confirmed that they are withdrawing from the MWC event due to the situation generated by coronavirus.
The other companies that announced that they will not attend the MWC 2020 event include MediaTek, Intel, and more. Vivo has recently announced that it will not attend the event. Other brands like Sony, Amazon, LG, NVIDIA, Ericsson and more also revealed earlier that they will not attend this year’s Mobile World Congress.