Achema 2009, which ended on Friday in Frankfurt, attracted more than 173,000 visitors and 3,767 exhibitors.
It featured the latest products and technologies from chemical engineering, biotechnology, environmental protection and adjacent sectors.
Companies, institutes and research institutions displayed their developments from chemical engineering, pharmaceutical and food technology, biotechnology and related sectors over an area of 134,000 metres.
Twenty-eight per cent of visitors and 46.6 per cent of the exhibitors came from abroad.
About 50 per cent of all contacts made at Achema tend to lead to co-operations.
The Achema Congress's overriding theme was process efficiency.
Biotechnological processes and the application of renewable resources were also key topics.
Many exhibitors displayed novel micro-structured components, while nanotechnology and ionic fluids also played prominent roles.
After Germany, which had 2,010 companies exhibiting, the strongest group was Italy (300 exhibitors), followed by the UK (202), Switzerland (161), USA (156), France (124), China (117) and India (107).
The largest exhibition group was pumps, compressors, valves and fittings, which had 960 exhibitors.
This was followed by laboratory and analytical equipment (659), thermal (437), mechanical (404) and processing and plant engineering (343).
The 900 lectures attracted scientists and developers to the lecture rooms to discuss the latest market-ready research results.
Topics of general interest included four plenary lectures and four panel discussions.
One attraction was the panel discussion on 'Green Gene Technology', featuring federal environment-minister Sigmar Gabriel and BASF executive-director Stefan Marcinowski.
When the halls closed on Friday evening the next countdown began for the organisers: the opening of the eighth Achemasia, the foremost event for equipment suppliers to the process industry in Asia, on 1 June 2010 in Beijing, China.
