Prime minister Anthony Albanese addresses a Beef 2024 audience

BEEF Australia has reported a $1.55 million ‘net profit’ for the triennial national beef industry event held in May this year.

By nature of the Rockhampton event’s non-profit charity status, the result is technically called a ‘surplus’ rather than a ‘profit’, but it turns around a ‘loss’ of $744,000 recorded at the previous 2021 event, which was held under considerable duress and uncertainty during the COVID period.

The 2024 result was achieved on turnover of $20.5 million, with $19 million worth of expenses incurred, giving a return of 7.5 percent.

This year’s positive financial performance exceeds the $1.4 million surplus achieved back at the same event in 2018, but that result was achieved on turnover of only $10 million.

The results were tabled during Beef 2024’s annual general meeting on Friday, when MDH director Adelaide McDonald was elected the board’s new chair, replacing Bryce Camm.

Action in this year’s stud beef judging rings

Attendance

The three-yearly event set records for attendance during the activity-packed week-long program between 5 and 11 May. Organisers claimed an attendance record for this year’s event, with 119,324 ‘movements through the gate,’ up from 115,000 three years earlier. Sixty two percent of the visitors were from outside the Greater Rockhampton region, a survey showed.

‘Movements through the gate’ is not unique visitor numbers, but also counts return visits by the same person over multiple days, or indeed within a single day. Beef Central has been told the unique visitor number (different people in attendance throughout the event) was about 46,500, not including about 2000 people involved in exhibiting livestock.

Beef 2024 points to other events like Brisbane’s annual Ekka event, in reporting numbers via the ‘movements through the gate’ metric. The difference is that the overwhelming majority of Brisbane Ekka-goers visit once only, rather than over multiple days.

Metrics like this are important, because they give potential exhibitors – many of whom paid tens of thousands of dollars to have a presence at this year’s Rockhampton event – a better gauge of their return on investment.

While the previous 2021 event was staged without overseas visitation due to COVID restrictions,  this year there were more than 600 international delegates registered from North and South America, Asia, Europe and across the Pacific Islands. Thirty five countries were represented during the week, records show.

Regardless of which attendance metric is applied, the triennial Beef Expo remains easily the largest gathering of beef industry stakeholders in Australia.

In November, Beef 2024 won the Major Festivals and Events category in the 2024 Queensland Tourism Awards.

While this year’s expo was an overwhelming success, perhaps inevitably for a large, multi-tiered event there were also some criticisms raised among the many exhibitors and beef industry people present, including:

• The price of take-away food – some delegates produced social media posts revealing they were being charged as much as $35 for a burger and chips
• The cost of attendance at seminar and conference sessions – some of which attracted only disappointing numbers as a result (see below), and
• Limits on alcohol purchasing to dedicated site-providers only, meaning commercial trade exhibitors were asked to pay $150 for a carton of stubbies bought to entertain their guests.

The next triennial event will be staged in Rockhampton from 2-8 May, 2027.