Web Summit, one of the biggest tech conferences in the world announced that Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, will remain the host city of the conference for the next decade.
This is thanks to a new $128 million deal where Web Summit will receive $12.8 million per year from Portugal. This deal is after a robust and competitive tender process that involved offers from over 20 cities across Europe.
Also included in the deal is to double the size of the Altice Arena in Lisbon in the next three years to accommodate Web Summit’s growth forecast. Web Summit also agreed to a $3.5 billion buyout clause, which is the minimum expected economic impact of Web Summit to Portugal over the duration of its contract.
Web Summit is a huge economic deal for Portugal. It was estimated that it generated more than $300 million for the country in 2017 and you can see why Portugal was keen to make sure than the event was held in the country for the next decade.
Web Summit conference held in Lisbon is usually a big deal. It hosts over 70,000 attendees with over 1,200 speakers and 2,600 journalists from over 170 countries. Huge tech companies exhibit at the event including Google, IBM, AWS, Microsoft, Cisco, Huawei and more.
Such a gathering is where you get to listen and interact with top executives from big companies. This year for example, some of the 2018 speakers include CEOs, founders and Presidents from Booking.com, eBay, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitch, Slack, Tinder, Twitter, Microsoft, Samsung and even the one who invented the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee.
In Africa, we have seen the likes of Rwanda starting the Africa Tech Summit Kigali which is geared to be the place where you get to connect with various stakeholders in the African tech community. This kind of conferences could prove to be beneficial to the city being held and the country at large and you can see that clearly from the Web Summit-Portugal partnership.
