This is the first really big user group meeting Yokogawa has had in the United States, and a lot of it is that they've brought the Technology Innovation Fair to the US from Japan for the first time.
Just to show you how steep the run-up curve is, last year, we had 80 end users, and we all fit on one-third of a Potomac River cruise boat for dinner. Today, there are 600 end users, 50 reps, 65 vendor partners and about 200 Yokogawa personnel from all over the world. What a huge difference!
And considering that Yokogawa had almost 200 attendees at their EMEA conference in Bahrain less than two weeks ago, this is an astoundingly huge showing for Yokogawa. It looks like Yokogawa is well on the way to being the major player (outside Japan) that Uchida-san says they are.
