I’ve been walking the aisles of Excon since the days when you could still count the excavators on display and finish a round of the exhibition before your filter coffee turned cold. What many newcomers don’t realise is that the crowding of big market players — the global clusters, the country pavilions, the multinationals rolling in with truckloads of machinery — wasn’t always the norm for the trade show’s exhibition arena.
In fact, the very first edition of the CII-organisedm show held at the Palace Grounds in Bangalore, back in 2000, was treated more as a curiosity than a marketplace. CE sector veterans often allude to this when we chat: how the debut Excon was essentially a modest local affair, a few manufacturers showcasing machines on a small patch of ground, more village fair than global convention. One still remembers wandering off to a dog show being held in another section of the venue — something to see after you’d finished looking at the earthmovers. That was Excon’s scale back then: earnest, hopeful, experimental.
Fast forward to today and that humble beginning feels almost mythical. What we have now, as we enter the 13th edition in December 2025, is nothing short of a global brand — a technological demonstrator with size, scale, and serious business embedded into every aisle. The fact that the world’s top OEMs scramble for space here, that investment decisions get shaped on its floors, and that policy dialogue quietly slips between the pavilions, tells you just how far this event has travelled from its early days of curiosity-driven footfall.
The transformation, of course, didn’t happen overnight. The first Excon solved a problem the industry hadn’t yet articulated: where do we meet? For the first time, contractors, OEMs, financiers, and policymakers shared physical space. It immediately became clear how much latent demand existed for a common platform. By the second and third editions, the shift was unmistakable — Excon had become the place where brands found visibility, technology found context, and business found momentum. It wasn’t just an exhibition; it was the industry’s gathering point, an arena of trust.
Today, that gathering has evolved into a massive, multi-hall ecosystem with more than 1,500 exhibitors, close to 80,000 business visitors, and what can only be described as a temporary city of cranes, simulators, electric excavators, AI dashboards, parts hubs, and sustainability showcases. The logistics alone are a spectacle: ODC convoys rolling into Bangalore at dawn, demo zones mapped out with near-military precision, OEMs treating Excon as the flagship event of their annual calendar. But the true value of Excon rests not in its size but in how it changed the very mechanics of CE business in India.
Before Excon, procurement cycles were slow, fragmented, and uncertain. After Excon, contractors could walk into the venue with specs and walk out with financing conversations underway and machines close to order-ready. Innovation, too, shifted from concept to action — telematics, hybrid engines, AI-driven safety systems, and predictive maintenance dashboards weren’t theoretical slides anymore; they were live, noisy, testable demos before your eyes. Localization took off because of this visibility. Global OEMs realised India wasn’t just a buyer’s market — it was a manufacturing opportunity. One by one, factories, assembly lines, parts warehouses, and engineering centres mushroomed across the country. A similar transformation unfolded in the rental segment, which found its coming-of-age moment at Excon, turning fleet optimisation into a viable business and reshaping contractor behaviour from “own everything” to “rent smarter.”
Perhaps the most subtle yet powerful shift Excon enabled was the rise of data-driven thinking. Terms like uptime, TCO, idling hours, and predictive servicing have now become commonplace across boardrooms and job sites, thanks to consistent exposure at the show. In many ways, Excon normalised digital adoption in a traditionally analogue industry.
What I’ve always admired is Excon’s refusal to stagnate. Each edition arrives with more ambition — more exhibitors, more launches, more overseas delegations, more technology, and more participation from segments we barely acknowledged two decades ago. This growth reflects India’s infrastructure momentum under NIP, Gati Shakti, and state-led mega investments. Policy intent meets business execution on the floors of this show — that’s the multiplier effect at work.
A walk through Excon today feels like previewing the next decade of jobsites. Precision-driven machines tearing through demo tracks, AR simulators training operators, AI dashboards interpreting fleet behaviour in real time, and safety systems predicting risks before humans spot them. The bragging rights have changed too — it’s not about weight or horsepower anymore, but about intelligence, efficiency, sustainability, and lifecycle cost.
Speaking of sustainability, that has been Excon’s most impressive pivot. What began as a polite corner showcase is now a massive sustainability movement — electric excavators humming quietly, hybrid backhoes, carbon tracking tools, eco-friendly fluids, recycling systems, green concrete solutions. With emission norms tightening and EPC players demanding greener fleets, Excon 2025 is primed to host the largest clean-energy equipment lineup in the show’s history.
Behind all of this steel and software lies Excon’s intellectual backbone — the workshops, policy dialogues, operator training sessions, finance briefings, startup pitches, and technology deep-dives. It’s a rolling academy for the CE fraternity, where knowledge and experience collide productively.
Which brings me to why Excon 2025 feels epochal. Because timing, technology, capacity expansion, sustainability, and global attention are converging in a way I’ve never seen in two decades of covering this industry. India’s infra push is at full tilt, digitalisation is scaling, Make-in-India is maturing, global OEMs are looking at India as a CE hub, and the world’s eyes are on Bangalore today.
And with the trade show’s gates now open, the difference between the dog-show era and the global-powerhouse era would have been impossible to ignore for all those who had journeyed to first edition of the event many, many moons ago. Excon, this time around, isn’t just hosting another edition — it is demonstrating how Indian industry built its own force multiplier.
Shrikant Rao – CE sector analyst, author-storyteller and consulting editor
