Stall fabrication at Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC)

Exhibiting at Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC)

Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC) is one of Hyderabad's key exhibition venues, hosting trade fairs, consumer expos and corporate events throughout the year. Everything from the first 3D concept to clearing the stand after dismantle is handled by one team and one project manager.

A venue imposes a rulebook, and the stall has to be built to it: how high you can go, whether you can hang anything, what you may fix into the floor, how much power you get and which hours you can work. We read that rulebook at design stage, not at build-up.

Placed against the rest of the Hyderabad list, Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC) is the practical middle of it — clear span and usable height, bought at the price of a single shared door. Knowing that before you design is what stops a stand being drawn for a hall and then built in a ballroom, which is the most expensive revision in this business.

Hyderabad has the depth of a Tier 1 market — 6 named exhibition venues and 11 venue categories on our list. Depth helps with availability and hurts with scheduling, because every exhibitor in the hall is working to the same window through the same access point.

Building in a convention or banquet hall

What a banquet or convention hall offers is clear span — no columns in the middle of your stand and a ceiling high enough to build upwards into. What it rarely offers is a dock. Material comes in through a door and along a corridor on trolleys, in a slot you share, which is why the stand is designed as carried sections with concealed joints.

Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC) is read here as a convention centre, which is how we plan a build until the organiser's pack for your edition says otherwise. The pack is what settles height, rigging, fixing, power and hours for a specific show, and the same building can issue different rules for two shows in the same month.

What to ask the organiser about Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC)

Most of what goes wrong at convention centre goes wrong because a question was not asked early. These are the ones worth asking before you brief a designer, let alone a fabricator.

Who exhibits at Hyderabad venues, and what that changes

IT & software, pharma, biotech, defence and real estate account for most of the exhibiting activity in Hyderabad, and the sector is a bigger design input than the brand is. A pharma visitor and a biotech visitor will judge the same 18 sq.m by completely different criteria, so we brief against the sector first and the identity second.

Where a Hyderabad show draws from several of those sectors at once, the stand has to serve two briefs in one footprint. Zoning does it — pharma on the open frontage where it needs to be seen, biotech in the pocket behind where it needs to be discussed — and the space plan below is where that gets decided.

Stall sizes and lead times for Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC)

Most stands at a venue like this fall between 9 and 72 sq.m. The table below uses the same formula as our stall planner — storage at 10% of area up to 18 sq.m and 15% above, a meeting corner at 5% unless you are hosting meetings, display taking the remainder — so you can sanity-check a quote against the space you have actually booked.

The figures are the same ones our stall planner uses, so a quote can be checked against them line by line: storage at 10% of the area up to 18 sq.m and 15% above it, a meeting corner at 5% unless you are actually hosting meetings, display taking whatever remains, one staff member per 9 sq.m, and the number of visitors who can stand in the stall at once coming out at display area divided by 2.5.

Designing a stand that works at Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC)

Banquet halls put stands close together, so the differentiator is usually light rather than size. A stand that is brighter than its neighbours reads as better finished even when it is not bigger.

Plan the stand around one decision: what do you want a visitor to do in the ninety seconds they will give you? Everything else — the graphic hierarchy, where staff stand, where the product sits — follows from answering that honestly.

Exhibitors here come largely from IT & software, pharma and biotech, and an IT & software audience has specific expectations: product visible, specification available, and somewhere to talk without shouting. We design for that rather than applying a generic layout.

What else is in Hyderabad

We cover 5 other named exhibition venues in Hyderabad: HITEX Exhibition Centre, Nampally Exhibition Grounds, Shilpakala Vedika, Jalavihar and Novotel & HICC Halls. By name they break down into 2 event venues, 1 purpose-built exhibition or trade centre, 1 open ground or maidan and 1 hotel ballroom or hotel convention hall, and the gap between the easiest and the hardest of those to build in is larger than any gap in stall size.

We also cover 11 venue categories in Hyderabad — resort & lawn venues, 5-star hotel ballrooms, convention & banquet halls, open exhibition grounds, mall atriums, university & college campuses, industry association halls, stadium & sports complexes, corporate campus event spaces, industrial estate expo grounds and government exhibition grounds — because most Indian shows outside the top handful of cities happen in a room that was built for something else. Each of those categories has its own access, fixing and power pattern, and each gets its own page.

Exhibiting elsewhere in Telangana

Beyond Hyderabad we build in 2 other Telangana cities: Warangal and Karimnagar. Same drawings, same workshop, same project manager — which is what makes a second city cheaper than the first rather than a repeat of it.

A stand engineered for this venue is rarely a one-show asset. Frame-and-skin construction lets the structure be stored and re-skinned for the next city, which is why the second show in a programme costs materially less than the first.

If this venue is one stop on a programme, say so at design stage. A stand drawn to be reused is drawn differently — demountable joints, numbered panels, graphics on replaceable skins and a storage footprint that fits a standard crate — and retrofitting that later costs more than building it in.