Of course, major efforts made by organizers to draw visitors held out a hope for the exhibition to be populous. The reality surpassed all expectations: wide passages between stands were crowded from the first till the last hour. The extremely hot summer of 2010 did its bit. Each year lots of new companies join Climate World, but this year the number of newbies doubled—last autumn heads of many companies from related industries realized that air conditioners and ventilation systems might bring big gains.

G. Mikheykin, Alyans Company Group Commercial Director:

This year Climate World was attended by more than ever companies that hadn’t been engaged in AC business before but who now want it desperately, and to this end they came to the exhibition. On one hand, there are fears that, as nonpros, they will ruin the industry, but, on the other hand, new companies entering a market is the very essence of market development. So, we believe that this is a good trend. A company, for example, engaged exclusively in PVC windows business now offers air conditioners to its customers that came to order windows. Such an offer may be very attractive for a customer renovating his or her apartment. So, we are definitely interested in those companies, and their multitude is a distinguishing feature of Climate World–2011.

Will the summer of 2011 be as hot as that of the previous year? Will the sales be as high as the year before? Which air conditioners, and how many of each kind, should be purchased from manufacturers and dealers? Perhaps, these are central questions every professional of the industry is worried about. One of the first speeches of the extensive Business Program crossed all the t’s. According to Georgy Litvinchuk, well known marketing expert and analyst, although this year is going to be warm, return of the last year’s heat shouldn’t be expected. And what is even worse, the summer of 2012 will probably be much cooler than this year’s. Bumper demand for air conditioners in January and February of 2011 spurred sales to the level of spring months, while January is usually considered to be low season. But every coin has two sides. With summer decline in demand market participants that were attracted by growing demand and frightened by deficit of the last year are in the risk of having overstocked warehouses already by the late July–early August, so in the season end we may face dumping on the part of small companies willing to return by all means the funds invested in equipment.

The head of Litvinchuk Marketing Agency also pointed out that strong market growth was achieved for account of domestic split systems while sales of heavy-duty equipment scarcely increased. Today VRF systems and chillers are purchased for projects that had recently been unfrozen. At a time when there are no new constructions, we may expect certain decrease in the sector of industrial equipment, instead of growth.

However, not all market participants share the pessimistic forecast of Georgy Litvinchuk. They believe that the heat wave of 2010 was not the single cause of this substantial growth. Many point out that the economic crisis as well as the crisis of minds are long gone, customers don’t decide between cheap and reliable equipment like they did before, and government contracts are paid without fail. Return to pre-crisis sales volumes is now discussed aloud and not in hopeless whisper like a year before.

The Law on Saving Energy and Increasing Energy Efficiency that imposes marking and labels disclosing energy efficiency class of household appliances (including air conditioners) raises numerous issues in the professional society. Until quite recently the procedure of marking was not clear. This issue has been resolved in Europe, but in Russia duties often come without unambiguous regulations. In advance of the new season, this issue is perhaps the most topical for manufacturers and distributors. Dmitry Kuzin, APIC Executive Director, gave a detailed account of observance of the law, equipment marking requirements and efforts that APIC makes in this regard.

In this connection, HVAC&R equipment verification project initiated by APIC 18 months ago arouses special interest. Today we have results to speak of. All leading air curtain manufacturers operating on the Russian market took part in the verification. Konstantin Lesokhin, chief engineer at NPO Teplomash and technical director of the project, reported on the work done. He reminded that as air curtains were energy efficient devices, verification of their characteristics was essential in the light of complying with the requirements of Law No. 261-FZ. In the future the laboratory of APIC’s HVAC Business School may engage in verification of other HVAC&R devices. Energy efficiency marking keeps its original value only if equipment characteristics are confirmed by an independent center; otherwise, it’s just yet another ad label.

Issues of energy efficiency and energy saving were among major themes of this year’s exhibition. Representatives of ABOK held a number of workshops dedicated to heat losses, enhancing energy characteristics and improving energy-efficient heat and cold supply of buildings. With ABOK being trendsetter in this area, workshops were much sought after. Professor Yury Tabunschikov spoke, among other things, on plans of the Moscow government to save 40% of energy already in 2011, which level of energy saving is Russia’s target for 2020. To this end, a range of energy efficient measures was brought in. As was said, such non-traditional solutions as residual heat recovery from sewage effluents have already been implemented in Moscow residential complex Nikulino-2. The listeners also learnt that last year more strict building enclosure requirements were introduced in Moscow. Thus, Moscow has become a pilot platform to estimate effectiveness of any given energy saving and energy efficiency measures. So far we may say that adoption of Law No. 261-FZ gave significant momentum to the development of our sector.

Timur Samonchik, Amalva (Komfovent):

The exhibition was outstanding. Visitors showed great interest in energy efficient equipment. This year our stand attracted very many guests, even more than last year. We observe demand for energy-efficient ventilation equipment. Although heat recovery ventilation is new to the Russian market, local manufacturers of ventilation equipment took interest in our heat recovery units with rotary heat exchangers.

Also, much attention was attracted by the issue of Green Construction that was brought up by both ABOK representatives elaborating a relevant standard and specialists working in other certification system—BREEAM (Great Britain). Thousands of buildings all over the world have BREEAM certificates and, according to speakers, this certification scheme is suitable for Russia. Though, the fact should be mentioned that the national standard is being elaborated not only by ABOK, but also by a working group of Minprirody, which means that foreign standards are unlikely to become principal in our country.

Another traditional theme of Climate World is self-regulation. Within the framework of the exhibition, NP ISZS–Montazh held its ordinary general meeting.

F. Tokarev, General Director of NP ISZS-Montazh:

It is already a good and convenient tradition to hold our meetings at Climate World. Today we were happy to see more than four hundred people! We didn’t expect such high interest to the event—we even ran out of chairs and had to seek additional reserves. It is nice to know that regional companies are active in the exposition. This year, a lot of our regional members got new participants involved, and we saw many new faces.

The budget for the next year was approved and a number of critical decisions was adopted at the SRO meeting. One of these decisions is, for example, on establishing the Mediation Court (you can get more detail about it in SRO Advice of this issue). Special consideration was given to development of industry standards. It is no secret that de facto there is no regulatory framework for installation and maintenance of air conditioners and ventilation systems. SRO ISZS-Montazh, through a special working group of NOSTROY, is developing this issue. First fruit of this work is a standard for split system installation and maintenance, which has already been submitted for endorsement. Certification and professional development of professionals working in SRO member companies are another field of concern of SRO, i.e. development of transparent rules.

Need for certification of professionals was also discussed on the third day of the Business Program dedicated to the project of UNIDO/GEF/Minprirody for HCFC phase out. The goal of the project is phase out of HCFCs (R21, R22, R141b, and R142b) in the amount of 600 ODP-tons in the sectors of foam materials and refrigeration equipment.

Stefan Verstappen, DAIKIN CIS Chief Development Officer:

I would like to thank organizers for the opportunity to speak in front of so interested audience. We have always paid much attention to environment protection. Refrigerant production is one of our activities and we have been studying properties of various HCFC alternatives for a long time. My speech was dedicated to one of them, R32.

Even though global problems remain, the Russian market has its own unique way. We may say that despite negative macroeconomic factors our branch continues its development.

Mild pessimism gives place to very cautious, but still, optimism.

Companies, that have been working on our market for a long time, are expanding their scope of activities. This can be seen, for example, by heating equipment appearing at the stands of many participants. Number of companies engaged in HVAC&R equipment sales is obviously growing. We have the air-conditioning season of 2011 before us. We wish all the market participants to work during the coming season as successfully as at Climate World–2011.

We are waiting for them to present their success reports at the next Climate World that will take place on March 12–15, 2012.