The Tube & Pipe Journal - September 2010

FABTECH—
EQUIPMENT,
CONFERENCES,
NETWORKING

Find all the tools you need at the
Georgia World Congress Center

IT’S no secret that the U.S. population has been shifting southward for decades. In the past 30 years, the populations of South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia grew an average of 65 percent. Northern and northeastern states didn’t fare as well. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan grew less than 10 percent.

Jobs are a big draw. North Carolina has the Research Triangle ( Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill); Texas has refineries (Houston, Corpus Christi, and others); Alabama has its aerospace hub (Huntsville); and, of course, automobile manufacturers have been setting up shop throughout the South for decades.

These cities and many others have a lot to offer, but depending on whom you ask, Atlanta is the crown jewel. Measured by the number of Fortune 500 companies, Atlanta is fourth in the nation, trailing just three cities: New York City, Houston, and Dallas. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the world’s busiest by two measures—the number of passengers and the number of airplanes arriving and departing. The two main railroad hubs (CSX and Norfolk Southern) handle 120 to 150 trains each day. And, crucially,

By Eric Lundin, Editor

labor statistics show that Atlanta has been a hotbed of manufacturing for decades—for example, while U.S. manufacturing jobs grew by 5. 4 percent during the 1990s expansion, in Atlanta manufacturing jobs increased 40. 5 percent.

By the same token, Atlanta is an ideal location for FABTECH® International, the metal forming and fabricating industry’s largest annual tradeshow. It had a successful Southern debut in Atlanta in 2006, and it will return in 2010. Just as the southern region is growing, FABTECH is growing too. In 2006 the organizers were the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International® (FMA), Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), and the American Welding Society (AWS). Since then the Precision Metalforming Association (PMA) and the Chemical Coaters Association International (CCAI) have joined the team. These five organizations draw on five varied but overlapping audiences—fabricators, engineers, welders, stampers, and coaters—and bring them together for the industry’s biggest annual event.