IFA 2026 drew 240,000 visitors from 155 countries and more than 2,000 exhibitors, while Samsung moved its main showcase downtown and the CityCube it had held alone since 2014 was split among dozens of exhibitors. IFA 2027 runs 3-7 September.
September 4-8, 2026 | Messe Berlin, Berlin, Germany | 2,000+ exhibitors from 51 countries across 190,000 sqm | 240,000 visitors from 155 countries | 5,200+ press and creators across 47 press conferences | Samsung's main public showcase off-site for the first time since its 1991 IFA debut | Next edition: September 3-7, 2027
IFA 2026 closed on Tuesday with its strongest figures in years and a visibly different floor plan. Both facts belong in the same sentence, because the second one explains more about where this show is heading than the first.
According to the organizer's closing release and the official post-show report, 240,000 visitors came to Berlin from 155 countries, up from 220,000 from 140 countries in 2025. More than 2,000 companies exhibited, up 5 percent, from 51 countries rather than 2025's 49, across 190,000 square meters.
"IFA 2026 was bigger and more international than ever before," said Leif Lindner, CEO of IFA Management GmbH. The organizers describe the outcome as record results, although the published data only establishes year-on-year growth in international reach. On raw attendance it needs a footnote: IFA drew 245,000 visitors in 2018, so 240,000 is a strong recovery rather than an all-time high.
The more consequential change was structural. Samsung Electronics moved its main public showcase off the Messe Berlin grounds for the first time since its 1991 IFA debut, and the hall it had occupied by itself since 2014 was carved up among dozens of exhibitors. Meanwhile Xiaomi, on the other side of the grounds, mounted what it calls its largest standalone overseas exhibition to date.
We flagged Samsung's move as the structural story of this edition in our IFA 2026 guide three weeks before the doors opened. What it actually produced was more interesting than a simple swap.
Samsung ended twelve years of exclusive occupancy in the CityCube, where its booth ran to roughly 6,000 square meters, and built a standalone showcase called Samsung Connect at Humboldt Carré in Berlin's Mitte district, roughly eight kilometers from the fairgrounds. It ran 2-6 September, opening two days before IFA itself, and on official show days it required an IFA trade visitor pass. Samsung's main product presentation and B2B program moved downtown.
The hardware justified the trip. Samsung showed the Odyssey G60H, a 27-inch monitor it bills as the world's first at 1,100Hz, alongside the Odyssey G75SJ and refreshed OLED G9 and G8 panels; development-stage Bespoke AI washers in 10kg and 13kg capacities, the smaller rated at up to 70 percent below the Class A energy minimum and the larger fitting SpaceMax into a standard 600mm European depth; and a Bespoke AI Refrigerator Family Hub with expanded AI food recognition. "AI should deliver tangible benefits that people can see and experience in their everyday lives," said Benjamin Braun, Chief Marketing Officer at Samsung Europe.
Samsung has not left IFA, and it is worth being precise about that. It remained an official IFA exhibitor, listed in the show's own directory at Palais PAF-101 and with a meeting room in CityCube Hall B, and it was the main sponsor of the Creator Hub at Palais am Funkturm, which it shaped with its own program and interactive formats. What moved was the large public product exhibition. That still leaves an interesting question for anyone who plans exhibition budgets: what happens to a hall an anchor tenant stops filling.
At IFA 2026 the answer was: it stops being one brand's hall. The CityCube was reorganized around two themes, Mobility and the new Retail Innovation Zone, and filled by a spread of exhibitors rather than a successor anchor. Chinese mobility brands took much of it. The electric scooter maker NAVEE, exhibiting under the Dreame ecosystem, had the largest booth in the building; Xpeng mounted a substantial display of electric vehicles and flying-car concepts; AMD set up in the Retail Innovation Zone with gaming PCs and a keynote on "The Era of Personal AI." Because the Retail Innovation Zone gave over considerable floor to B2B meeting areas, contemporaneous reporting from the hall described it as feeling sparser than in previous years.
Separately, and elsewhere on the grounds, Xiaomi made its debut as a full IFA exhibitor. It took Hall 6.2 with more than 3,300 square meters, what it calls its largest standalone overseas exhibition to date, and used it to argue that it is a whole-home brand rather than a phone company: air fryers, washing machines, air conditioners, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and robots alongside the Xiaomi 18 Fold behind glass, a Vision Gran Turismo concept, and the SU7 Ultra and SU7 Max electric cars.
Those two things happened in different buildings and they are not a substitution. Read together, though, they are the clearest signal this edition produced. IFA's anchor-brand hierarchy is being rewritten faster than its floor plan suggests. The incumbent that defined a whole building for twelve years decided the building was optional; a first-time exhibitor arrived at a scale it has never attempted outside its home market; and the vacated space refilled with dozens of exhibitors rather than another single-brand anchor.
There is a real cost to the split that none of the growth figures capture, and it is worth stating plainly as our own read rather than the organizer's. IFA's core promise to a trade visitor is comparison: walk the grounds, see competing ecosystems side by side, and leave with a view. A major exhibitor sitting eight kilometers away breaks that promise for anyone whose shortlist included it. Comparison shopping does not survive a taxi ride across Berlin.
Here is the context the closing release leaves out.
The German home electronics market that IFA principally serves contracted in the first half of 2026. According to gfu, the IFA trademark owner and co-shareholder, total sales came to EUR 20.6 billion, down 2.5 percent year on year. Consumer electronics fell 3.2 percent to EUR 12.7 billion. Large electrical appliances fell 5.1 percent to EUR 4.4 billion. Only small electrical appliances grew, up 4.0 percent to EUR 3.5 billion.
"Consumer sentiment remains at a low level, due to the global situation and the associated tendency to save as well as general uncertainty," said Carine Chardon, Managing Director of gfu, in the August report.
So IFA grew its visitor count 9 percent while its home market shrank 2.5 percent. That gap is the single most useful comparison in this recap, and it points at where the growth is coming from: not from German consumers, but from internationalization. Visitor countries went from 140 to 155 and exhibitor countries from 49 to 51. Those are the numbers doing the work.
The exhibitor side tells the same story from the other direction. Chinese participation has been climbing sharply: pre-show reporting put it at roughly 900 companies for 2026, up from around 700 the previous year, approaching half the reported exhibitor count. That is a pre-show count rather than an organizer actual, and it counts companies rather than floor area, so treat the precision with caution. The direction is not in doubt. Xiaomi in Hall 6.2 and NAVEE's booth in the CityCube are the same trend in two different buildings.
IFA is unusual among shows of its size in running a B2B trade fair and a public expo in the same halls in the same week. The headline 240,000 combines both audiences.
The post-show report tells you the composition of the trade visitors who came: 67 percent international, 33 percent domestic. That is a genuinely useful ratio. What it does not tell you is how many trade visitors there were. For a brand weighing a stand in Berlin, that is the number the entire business case rests on, and it is the one number IFA does not disclose.
This is not a metric the show has never had. The IFA 2018 release reported almost 150,000 trade visitors out of 245,000 total, noted that more than half came from abroad, and put a figure on business done at the show: EUR 4.7 billion in order volume. That level of disclosure is gone.
None of which means the 2026 edition underperformed. It means the published record no longer answers the first question a prospective exhibitor asks. If you are building a 2027 business case, request the trade-visitor headcount from the organizers directly as part of the space conversation. If the figure is unavailable, do not model expected ROI from the headline gate alone.
Every technology show in 2026 claims AI. IFA's version had a specific and defensible shape: AI that occupies physical space.
The grounds carried more robots than any previous edition, from autonomous mowers and household robots to humanoids. The new "Robots on the Runway" feature put humanoid and entertainment robots on the Creator Stage to demonstrate and interact with the audience. Mobility ran alongside it, from electric and connected vehicles up to flying-car concepts, and the CityCube's reorganization around that theme was the clearest statement of where the organizers think the growth is.
The appliance side made the same argument more quietly, and more usefully: a dishwasher that selects its own program, a washing machine that doses its own detergent, irrigation and outdoor systems that manage water and energy on their own. The smart home now extends into the garden, which is why the Outdoor and Gardening area was expanded for 2026.
LG, which took Best of Brand at the Innovation Awards, ran Hall 18 under the theme "Innovation in tune with you" and gave the public debut to ThinQ Claw, a text-chat AI agent built on the OpenClaw concept and tuned for LG's AI Home stack. It also pushed the same platform into commercial buildings with ThinQ Pro, a B2B management layer for appliances and HVAC. Elsewhere the display and robotics categories were dense: Hisense's RGB MiniLED, TCL's X11L with 20,736 dimming zones alongside NXTPAPER AMOLED phones and RayNeo smart glasses, and a large field of robot vacuum and lawn-care launches from Ecovacs, Dreame and others.
IFA's professional program grew and specialized.
The IFA Retail Leaders Summit brought together more than 100 senior international decision-makers from retail and industry, working through AI in the purchase process, omnichannel, fulfillment and logistics, and the role of marketplaces. The newly created Retail Innovation Zone gave that conversation a physical demonstration space for store concepts, services and business models, in the same building Samsung vacated.
IFA Global Markets, the OEM and ODM sourcing platform, ran 5-7 September alongside the main show and connected suppliers from more than 20 countries with buyers and product managers. IFA NEXT, the startup and research showcase, fielded around 300 exhibitors from 24 countries, up 15 percent, across humanoid robotics, smart glasses, AI wearables and smart living.
Politics turned up as well. The opening tour carried Dr. Karsten Wildberger, Federal Minister for Digital Affairs and State Modernization; Dr. Silke Launert, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space; Stefan Evers, Berlin's Mayor and Senator for Finance; and Franziska Giffey, Mayor and Berlin Senator for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises.
The clearest audience growth in the 2026 figures is in media and creators, not in the halls.
More than 5,200 press, bloggers and content creators attended across Media Days and the show itself, taking in 47 press conferences. The stage program ran more than 150 sessions with more than 350 speakers. More than 1,500 influencers, creators and streamers participated through the Creator Hub, a 25 percent increase on 2025's 1,200-plus.
That 25 percent is the largest disclosed gain among attendance categories this year, and it is worth reading next to the Samsung decision rather than separately from it. Samsung dropped its public stand and kept its Creator Hub sponsorship. The part of its IFA presence it chose to retain is the part growing fastest.
New audience formats filled in around it: IFA Podcast Days brought live podcast recordings to the stages, the IFA Playbox opened as a dedicated family and children's zone for the first time, and the "Art Shapes the Future" exhibition ran with Fotografiska and Volkswagen R. In the Sommergarten, BUNT. and "Ikkimel & Friends" played sold-out open-air concerts.
The IFA Innovation Awards, presented in collaboration with the Gadgety Awards, ran their second edition and honored winners at a dedicated live ceremony for the first time.
Three master awards were given. Best of IFA went to the Anker RIC Hearing Aids Pro as the strongest product overall. Best of Tech went to the Insta360 Luna Ultra. Best of Brand went to LG Electronics for performance across categories. Thirteen further categories were awarded, spanning audio, beauty tech and wellbeing, design, communication and connectivity, computers and gaming, content creation, household appliances, home entertainment, IFA NEXT and future technologies, mobility, smart home, sustainability, and technology for social value. An independent international jury of journalists and industry experts judged on technology, functionality, design, degree of innovation and sustainable added value.
The organizers reported more than 530 submissions and described this as a significant increase. The 2025 program reported more than 500. That is real growth in its second year, but it is closer to 6 percent than the framing suggests.
Anchor tenancy is now negotiable, and shows know it. Samsung retained its official IFA relationship and Creator Hub sponsorship while moving its main product showcase off-site, exactly the pattern it followed at CES 2026 by choosing the Wynn over the Las Vegas Convention Center. IFA absorbed it, but not by finding a replacement anchor: the CityCube became a themed, multi-brand hall instead. If you are a mid-size exhibitor, the useful read is that single-brand halls are no longer a permanent feature of the floor plan, and prime space can be repartitioned rather than inherited by another anchor brand.
The comparison argument is the one to test. If your category depends on buyers comparing you against a competitor in the same afternoon, being on the main floor is worth more than it was two years ago, because a significant competitor is no longer standing next to you.
Budget against internationalization, not the German market. The show grew 9 percent while its home market fell 2.5 percent. If your 2027 business case rests primarily on German sell-through, the market data supports a more cautious demand forecast. If it rests on meeting buyers from 155 countries in one week, the show data supports it. Those are different cases and they need different numbers.
Ask for the trade-visitor headcount before you commit. The published 240,000 is a combined trade and public figure. The report gives you the 67/33 international split of trade visitors but not how many there were. Request it during any 2027 space negotiation.
IFA 2027 runs 3-7 September 2027 at Messe Berlin, with Media Days on 1-2 September 2027. That is one day earlier in the month than the 2026 edition, and the same five-day, Friday-to-Tuesday shape.
IFA 2026 ran 4-8 September 2026 at Messe Berlin in Berlin, Germany, across five show days preceded by Media Days. IFA Global Markets, the OEM and ODM sourcing platform, ran 5-7 September alongside the main show.
240,000 visitors from 155 countries attended, up from 220,000 from 140 countries in 2025. IFA runs as a combined trade fair and public expo, and while the organizers reported that trade visitors were 67 percent international and 33 percent domestic, they did not publish how many of the 240,000 were trade visitors rather than members of the public.
The organizers described the outcome as record results, supported by increases to 155 visitor countries and 51 exhibitor countries. On raw attendance it was not an all-time record, as IFA drew 245,000 visitors in 2018.
More than 2,000 companies exhibited, up 5 percent on 2025, from 51 countries rather than 49, across 190,000 square meters. IFA NEXT, the startup and research area, accounted for around 300 exhibitors from 24 countries, up 15 percent.
Samsung moved its main public product showcase off the Messe Berlin grounds for the first time since its 1991 IFA debut, ending exclusive occupancy of the CityCube that ran from 2014. It ran Samsung Connect, a standalone showcase at Humboldt Carré in central Berlin, from 2 to 6 September, focused on media, European retail partners and B2B customers and requiring an IFA trade pass on official show days. Samsung remained an official IFA exhibitor, listed at Palais PAF-101 and with a meeting room in CityCube Hall B, and was the main sponsor of the IFA Creator Hub on the fairgrounds. The move mirrors its CES 2026 decision to use the Wynn rather than the Las Vegas Convention Center.
No single brand did. The CityCube was reorganized around two themes, Mobility and the new Retail Innovation Zone, and shared among many exhibitors rather than handed to a successor anchor. Chinese mobility brands took much of the space: the electric scooter maker NAVEE, exhibiting under the Dreame ecosystem, had the largest booth in the building, and Xpeng showed electric vehicles and flying-car concepts. AMD exhibited in the Retail Innovation Zone. Xiaomi, often mentioned in the same breath, was not in the CityCube at all - its 3,300-square-meter debut stand was in Hall 6.2.
Three master awards were given: Best of IFA to the Anker RIC Hearing Aids Pro, Best of Tech to the Insta360 Luna Ultra, and Best of Brand to LG Electronics. Thirteen further categories were awarded, judged by an independent international jury from more than 530 submissions. 2026 was the program's second edition and the first with a dedicated live awards ceremony at the show.
IFA 2027 takes place 3-7 September 2027 at Messe Berlin in Berlin, Germany, with Media Days on 1 and 2 September 2027.
