Organization MWC will not set up a Russian pavilion this year

The organization of the Mobile World Congress, which starts on Monday, has announced that the ‘Russian pavilion’ will not be set up this year. While Russian companies can still pay for space at the show, some have actually been banned.

The Russian pavilion is usually used by smaller Russian participants in the fair, who do not have the money to rent space themselves. That does not mean a Russian ban, writes TechCrunch, among others; it is not forbidden for a large Russian company to just put a lot of money on the table and still get a booth that way.

Nevertheless, specific Russian companies and top executives are not welcome at the show, but organizer GSMA does not want to name names because that list is “still evolving”, Reuters reports. These bans were not imposed on the initiative of the GSMA, but are the result of international sanctions.

A sanction that may yet be imposed on Russia by the international community is the exclusion of the country from the Swift payment system. It is used by more than 11,000 financial institutions and 200 countries, Al Jazeera writes. Excluding Russia in this area would be a huge barrier to Russian companies doing business with the rest of the world. It is expected that this would also be a barrier for Russian companies to make an appearance at the MWC. To date, this sanction has not been implemented.

Every year, the Mobile World Congress makes many announcements of phones, tablets and smartphone software. For example, the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S II were unveiled at this event. The fair has existed in various forms since 1987. The fair was only skipped in 2020, due to the ongoing corona pandemic. The fair takes place in Barcelona.