AMB 2026 and IMTS 2026 closed: 65,000 visitors for the third edition running, 14% from management, 90,000 in Chicago, and why the carbide price letter arrives before your machine quote does
64,298. 65,584. About 65,000.
Those are AMB Stuttgart's visitor counts for 2022, 2024 and the edition that closed on Saturday, all from Messe Stuttgart's own press releases. Three editions inside a band of 1,300 people, across four years in which German machine-tool orders went from a slump to +14% in the first half and the VDMA cut its production forecast to −2%. The crowd does not move. What moved is who is in it, and what they asked.
Chicago closed the same day. imts.com now carries one sentence: IMTS 2026 "brought together over 90,000 attendees, over 1.17 million square feet of exhibit space and more than 1,700 exhibitors". That is registrations, not turnstiles, and AMT has not published a comparison with 2024 that I can read, so I will not print one.
| AMB 2022 | AMB 2024 | AMB 2026 | IMTS 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visitors | 64,298 | 65,584 | ~65,000 | 90,000+ registered |
| Exhibiting firms | – | >1,200 | 1,195 from 34 countries | 1,700+ |
| Visitors from management | – | 10% | 14% | – |
| Foreign visitors | – | – | 22%, from 76 countries | – |
| "Decision-relevant" visitors | – | – | 68% | – |
| Next edition | AMB 2028, Stuttgart | IMTS 2028, Chicago | ||
Sources: Messe Stuttgart closing releases of 17 Sept 2022, 14 Sept 2024 and 19 Sept 2026; imts.com, 21 Sept 2026. The management and decision-relevant shares are the organiser's own visitor figures.
Read the 2026 column as a procurement analyst reads a supplier's order book. Same number of buyers in the hall. One in seven from company or plant management, against one in ten two years ago. Two thirds described by the organiser as people who decide what gets bought. Those are the organiser's figures, and organisers publish cheerful figures, but the exhibitors' own statements in the closing release say the same thing in their own numbers. Index-Werke says it made direct sales off the stand, ten machines including the Traub MS12-4 that took the AMB Award. Iscar Germany says more customers came with concrete projects than last time. Gühring says its stand beat 2024 and calls the wider economy "anspruchsvoll", which is a German sales director's word for hard.
So the German sales desks went home on Saturday with project lists, not with a bigger market. That is the fact that matters to a shop in Taxila or Karachi that is nowhere near Stuttgart. A quotation request sent this week lands on a desk that is working through a week of European leads, and it will be prioritised the way sales desks prioritise: by who is closest to a purchase order. The RFQ that carries the drawing, the material, the batch size and the delivery date gets quoted first. The one that says "please send price list" waits until November.
The other thing the fair changed is on the tooling side, and it is the sentence I would put on the wall of a purchasing office. Ceratizit's Michael Blank, in the same release:
"A particular focus this year was on the subject of security of supply. We had many intensive and constructive conversations about it and found that this topic remains of great importance to our customers."
A carbide maker whose customers spent five days asking whether they will get their inserts is not a carbide maker about to cut its list price. Nobody at Stuttgart published a tungsten number, and I will not invent one. But when supply security is the theme of a tooling stand, the next letter from that stand is usually a price letter, and a buyer who has not fixed the year's insert pricing is the one who pays it.
One structural line from the hall. Heller and DN Solutions shared a stand for the first time, a German five-axis builder next to a Korean one. For a buyer with two quotes on the desk, a German one and a Korean one, that is the two quotes learning to talk to each other. Expect fewer gaps between them.
The award list is a reading list for a shop that will not see Stuttgart before 2028: Index-Werke for turning, Zecha for micro-tools, Renishaw for metrology, autonomIQ technologies for software, Zell Gruppe for automation, 3nine for components, Citizen Machinery Europe for the sustainability prize, Paul Horn for the jury's. Eight names, all from the organiser's list, none of them a recommendation from me.
What a buyer does with this on Monday:
- Send the machine RFQ this week, complete, with a delivery date in it. The VDW's own man, Markus Heering, called the market "demanding" in the closing release, and a demanding market is one where a German builder with capacity quotes a clean RFQ inside a fortnight. The 18 September post already said the slot booked before 31 December is the cheap one; the fair did not change that, it filled the queue.
- Ask your carbide supplier for a twelve-month price, in writing, now. If they will only give three months, that is an answer too.
- Ask the Korean quote and the German quote the same delivery question and see whether the answers have converged.
My prediction, and it is mine, not the organiser's: at least one of the four carbide makers named in the closing release, Ceratizit, Iscar, Gühring or Paul Horn, issues a list-price increase on cutting tools effective before 31 March 2027. The reasoning is in this article: a flat crowd with more deciders and one question on every tooling stand. If all four hold their 2026 lists through the first quarter, I read the fair wrong and the supply-security talk was a sales line, not a cost.
Sources
- AMB press releases, Messe Stuttgart: "AMB 2026 schließt mit positivem Blick in die Zukunft" (19 Sept 2026), "AMB 2024 Showcases the Potential and Future of Metal Working" (14 Sept 2024, 65,584 visitors), and the 2022 closing release (17 Sept 2022, 64,298 visitors)
- AMB 2026 endet mit 65'000 Besuchern aus 76 Ländern, Technische Rundschau, 19 Sept 2026: the full text of Messe Stuttgart's closing release with the exhibitor statements. The Ceratizit and Gühring quotations are translated from the German by the author.
- IMTS 2026 closing statement, imts.com, read 21 Sept 2026
- Drone Flight at AMB 2026: Innovations for Modern Manufacturing, DMG MORI
- HEDELIUS auf der AMB 2026 | CNC-Bearbeitungszentren & Automation live in Stuttgart, HEDELIUS Maschinenfabrik
- AMB 2026 Highlights: Productive Machines x MSC Interview, Productive Machining
- IMTS Recap Day 2, IMTS
- IMTS Wrap: Day 1, SME Media
- AMB 2026: Where Metal Comes Alive | Get Your Ticket Now, Messe Stuttgart. The six videos are credited for their titles and frames; no transcript was read for this article.
- Earlier on this site: VDMA machinery forecast 2026 (18 Sept), Taiwan's machine-tool exports fell 4.6% (13 Sept), German orders up 14%, production down 7% (12 Sept), What to send with a machining RFQ (6 Sept)