JEC World 2027
Villepinte (Paris Nord).

What JEC World is, in two lines

JEC World is the world’s largest show dedicated to the composite materials industry: it brings together in Paris the entire composites value chain, from raw materials to semi-finished products, from manufacturing processes to equipment all the way to end applications in aerospace, automotive, wind, marine and construction. It is an annual event held at the Paris Nord Villepinte Exhibition Centre and, in the 2026 edition, it drew more than 45,000 visitors from 94 countries, over 1,400 exhibitors from more than 50 countries across 78,000 m², with 20,300 business meetings (+49%) compared with the previous year. This is not a generalist trade fair: it is the place where the global composites supply chain comes to see, in concrete terms, who supplies what.

Precisely because of this concentration, what many exhibitors underestimate is that the real purchasing decisions are not closed at the booth: they mature in the following weeks, when the R&D manager or the buyer returns to the company, compares the suppliers they met and opens the internal technical evaluations. In the composites world, the qualification cycles for a material or a process are long, but they start from the very short window of post-show memory. Whoever mishandles their leads in the days and weeks after JEC World loses, right there, exactly the pipeline they paid dearly to generate. Being present at the fair is 30% of the work; the remaining 70% is what happens to the contacts afterwards.

What to exhibit, where to exhibit

JEC World is laid out mainly across Hall 5 and Hall 6 of Paris Nord Villepinte, following a logic that is not only product-based but organised by the composites value chain and by geography. The key areas to think about:

• 27 regional and international pavilions (Country on Stage): the national groupings where delegations cluster suppliers by geographic area, useful both for those looking for a country cluster and for those who want to be found by buyers from a given region
• Innovation Planets: the areas dedicated to innovation and to emerging materials and processes, where R&D profiles and technical decision-makers looking for the next step concentrate
• Live Demo Area: the space for live process demonstrations, where technology is seen working, not just described in words
• Agora (Hall 5 and Hall 6): the spaces hosting the JEC World Conferences, magnets for qualified traffic during the programme slots

The practical positioning advice: choose your area based on who you are looking for, not on what you are. A maker of fibres or resins can sit in its own country’s pavilion, but it intercepts the right decision-makers if it also plays the innovation card near the Innovation Planets or brings a concrete process demonstration. Study the map of Hall 5 and Hall 6 and the flows before signing for your space: proximity to the Agora and the demo areas decides how many of the right profiles walk past you.

Visitor profile

The JEC World visitor is technical, international and holds high decision-making power: 94 countries represented, a strong European centre of gravity (France leading, the DACH area, Italy, Spain) but with significant presence from North America and Asia. It is an audience that arrives with concrete application problems, from structural lightweighting to materials sustainability. The typical make-up of the crowd:

• R&D managers and materials engineers (around 25-30%): they arrive with precise technical specifications and look for solutions that can be qualified in their processes
• Industrial buyers and procurement, especially aerospace and automotive (around 20%): they compare suppliers and semi-finished products, often with a shortlist already in hand
• Composites manufacturers and processors (around 15-20%): they look for raw materials, equipment and process partners along the supply chain
• Decision-makers in the marine, wind, construction and rail sectors (growing): driven by lightweighting, durability and the energy transition
• Advanced-materials startups and investors (a minority share but high value): who walk the show for technology scouting and partnerships, also around Startup Booster and JEC Investor Day

The average seniority is high: a significant portion of visitors hold a decision-making role or strong influence over the qualification of materials and suppliers. This is why the risk is not a scarcity of contacts, but the opposite: in three days at this density you speak with hundreds of people and, without a structured capture system, you remember a fraction of them. The quality of the data gathered at the booth matters more than the number of scans.

How to prepare in the 4 weeks before the event

Week -4 → Messaging audit

Make sure your value proposition answers the three questions every technical visitor asks within the first 30 seconds at the booth:

1. What you do, in one sentence (e.g. “recycled carbon fibre for high-cadence moulding”)
2. For whom, a precise ICP segment (e.g. “tier-1 automotive industrialising structural composites”)
3. What changes, a measurable benefit (% weight saved, cost per part, moulding cycle, recycled content)

The composites audience rewards technical concreteness: data, mechanical properties and qualifiability, not marketing. At JEC World, where competitors are often in the same halls a few metres away, a generic promise makes you indistinguishable. No slides, one clear sentence repeated identically by every person on the team.

Week -3 → Stand operation playbook

Across three intense, high-density days, the risk is dispersion. Define who does what:

• Who staffs the front line of the booth and welcomes the flow
• Who handles technical demos and the senior R&D / procurement decision-makers who show up
• Who stays back-office (HQ) to kick off the follow-up on the hottest leads already during the event
• How shifts rotate: the days are long and the quality of conversations drops after a few hours, so plan the team’s rotation

Decide in advance, too, how appointments are set: a good share of the best traffic at JEC World is organised before the fair, including through the business-meeting agenda in the official app. With 20,300 business meetings in the 2026 edition, the pre-booked appointment is half the result.

Week -2 → 3-question qualification form

Every contact gathered must be qualified on the spot, not “later”. With over 45,000 visitors across three days, “later” is an indistinct magma of business cards. The critical questions are just three:

1. Timing, when is a solution needed, or when does the material qualification start? (this quarter / 6 months / beyond / I don’t know)
2. Budget / project, is there already a programme or a budget line allocated?
3. Decision, who decides and how many functions are involved (R&D, procurement, quality)?

Everything else, company size, application sector, exact role, technical context, is found in the 30+ public data sources that good automatic enrichment covers without your having to subtract precious time from the conversation to ask for it.

Week -1 → CRM integration

The classic mistake: contacts on paper, photos of badges, scans in the app, and then no one pours them into the CRM. The average follow-up in manufacturing starts 9 days after the event, when the prospect has already spoken with your competitors, who at JEC World were in the same halls.

Set the system up so that every scan, at the fair, lands already in the company CRM, with an event tag + qualification answers + a voice note from the salesperson. Not in an Excel file, not only in the fair’s app, not in a sheet “we’ll sort out when we get back”. This step is what decides whether the three days of JEC World become pipeline or remain a pile of names.

Is the official JEC World app worth it?

Yes, the JEC World Mobile App is a useful tool and should be installed: it gives access to the conference programme, the business-meeting agenda, the exhibitor list, the map of Hall 5 and Hall 6 and the networking features to set appointments before and during the fair. For the visitor it is an excellent orientation tool; for the exhibitor, the business-meeting agenda helps pre-build conversations, decisive at an event that generates over 20,000 meetings.

That said, you need to understand what the app does NOT do, because that is exactly the piece that generates pipeline:

• It does not export to your CRM. Contacts and appointments live in the fair’s ecosystem, not in HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive
• It does not enrich the data. What you read is what’s there: no company size, application sector, technologies or verified role
• It does not qualify. It does not capture timing/budget/decision on the spot, leaving you with undifferentiated scans and contacts
• It does not send follow-up. You have to build the post-show sequence yourself, manually, after re-exporting the data
• It does not generate executive reports. At most a list of contacts
• It changes with every edition. Login, features and data format are not a stable system of yours: they are theirs

The app is a good navigation and networking tool. As a commercial lead-capture system fair → CRM → follow-up, it leaves uncovered everything that turns traffic into deals. That is the gap Linkly fills: scan at the booth → contact directly in your CRM with an event tag, qualification answers and the salesperson’s voice note → 6 AI agents that enrich the data from 30+ public sources, qualify it and trigger personalised follow-up → executive report. See how Linkly works.

What to do during the 3 days of the fair

Day 1 (Tuesday 2 March), opening and calibration

• Team briefing before the doors open: review the 3 messages and the roles. Day one is for tuning the machine
• Quick calibration: the first 10-15 leads serve to adjust the qualification questions and the demo timing, then you hit your stride
• On Tuesday the flow is already substantial: with only three days, JEC World runs at full speed from the start and many decision-makers arrive right at opening. Capture everyone, even those who say “I’ll come back tomorrow”
• Short debrief at the end of the day: what works, what to fix, which hot leads to call back already tonight

Day 2 (Wednesday 3 March), peak day

• It is usually the highest-traffic day with the highest decision-making density: the pre-booked business meetings and senior R&D / procurement profiles concentrate here
• Concentrate your main demos in the Live Demo Area and your key meetings here
• Keep one person back-office on live follow-up: Tuesday’s hot leads must be touched now, not after you get back
• Maximum discipline on on-the-spot qualification: it is the day when you gather the most contacts and risk dispersion the most

Day 3 (Thursday 4 March), closing, less traffic but more quality

• On the last day the flow drops, but those who come are often very targeted: fewer curious visitors, more operators with a precise goal and time to talk substance
• Devote it to closing the threads left open, gathering the last technical specifications and confirming the next steps agreed on the previous days
• Also take a targeted tour of Hall 5 and Hall 6: see the competitors, identify supply-chain partners (raw materials, process, equipment) and understand how you are positioning yourselves
• By the end of the day the entire lead base must already be in the CRM, qualified and tagged: the follow-up starts tonight, not next Monday

What to do in the 7 days after the fair

The average time between the fair and the first post-event contact, in manufacturing, is 9 days. Companies that cut it to under 48 hours close, on average, far more than their slow competitors. At JEC World this counts in an amplified way: your prospect met dozens of suppliers across three very concentrated days, their memory window is short and your competitors were in the same halls.

The winning follow-up playbook:

1. Within 24h, a personalised email to every qualified lead based on timing/budget/decision. No generic template: a concrete reference to something said at the booth (the application, the material, the spec discussed)
2. Within 7 days, an assigned account manager for every qualified lead, with a specific touchpoint scheduled (call, sample shipment, technical datasheet, visit). No batch email
3. Within 14 days, deliver on the promises made at the booth (datasheet, quote, sample, process sheet). Automatically extractable from the salesperson’s voice notes if the system recorded them
4. Within 30 days, an executive report on performance vs target: distribution by salesperson, application sector, area and estimated pipeline. It is the document with which you justify to the CFO the budget to come back next year

This is the point where Linkly’s 6 AI agents work in your place: contacts arrive already enriched and qualified in the CRM, the follow-up sequences start on their own with the right angle, and the executive report is generated without rebuilding anything by hand from an export.

Practical FAQ

How much does it cost to exhibit at JEC World 2027?

Official costs must be requested from JEC Composites and depend on floor area, position in Hall 5/6, type of stand (space only vs turnkey) and visibility. As a purely indicative reference for a world show of this scale, the space line typically starts from several hundred euros per square metre, and a complete outing (space + build + staff + travel + logistics in Paris) for a medium booth easily lands in the order of tens of thousands of euros. These are indicative estimates, not quotes: ask the organiser for the up-to-date price list and reason in terms of cost per qualified lead, not cost of space.

Which is the best day to staff the booth?

The central day (Wednesday 3 March) usually concentrates the highest traffic and the greatest decision-making density, and is where the business meetings cluster. Tuesday already starts strong (the fair lasts only three days, so there is no “warm-up day”), while Thursday drops in volume but brings very targeted visitors. In practice: all three days count, but plan your main demos and key meetings on the first two days.

When should visitors register?

Online and in advance, from the official site. Advance registration is the standard route, gives the digital badge (manageable from the app) and avoids queues at the Paris Nord Villepinte entrances. For exhibitors, space must be requested from JEC Composites well in advance: the best positions in Hall 5 and Hall 6 sell out months ahead.

Is the official app enough to manage leads?

No. The JEC World Mobile App is great for the programme, the business-meeting agenda, exhibitor search and networking, but it does not export to your CRM, does not enrich, does not qualify and does not send follow-up (see the dedicated section above). To turn scans into pipeline you need a fair → CRM → follow-up system like Linkly.

What is the alternative to collecting leads on paper or by photographing badges?

Paper and badge photos are the surest way to lose contacts: no one pours them into the CRM in time and the on-the-spot qualification disappears. In a sector where qualifying a material can take months, losing the context of the initial conversation is extremely costly. The alternative is to capture at the booth with a scan that lands directly in the CRM, with an event tag, qualification answers and a voice note, plus automatic data enrichment. That way the follow-up starts within 24h instead of after 9 days.

Page updated ahead of the 2027 edition. For official information and exhibitor/visitor registration, refer to the jec-world.events website.