There are growing fears that the giant Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona in late February might be canceled after more companies just pulled out of the event on concerns about the coronavirus outbreak.

Earlier this week, a slew of companies, including LG Electronics Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp., Amazon.com Inc., Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson and Nvidia Corp., decided a no-show was prudent, and that list has just grown considerably.

New to the list of dropouts, some today, are Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. (which usually has only a small presence), Sony Corp., AT&T Inc., Sprint Corp., Intel Corp., Royole Corp., Vivo Communication Technology Co. Ltd., MediaTek Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and many more.

The board that oversees the event, the GSM Association, faces a new challenge now to ensure MWC goes ahead. It had previously barred attendance by anyone from Hubei Province, where the outbreak started, but that obviously hasn’t allayed the fears of some of tech’s biggest names. Seeing as the incubation period for the virus could be up to 24 days, the ban will hardly induce confidence in possible attendees.

“We value our participation in important industry groups like GSMA and deeply respect the steps they have already taken to protect attendees,” said a spokesperson for AT&T Inc. “Unfortunately, the most responsible decision is to withdraw our participation from the event to safeguard our employees and customers.”

The same sentiments were issued in statement from other firms, which for the most part talked about their responsibility to their employees. Facebook said it was using an “abundance of caution,” while others said they were following the advice of health experts and not traveling.

The event in Barcelona was intended to go ahead Feb. 24, but the question now is if it will be cancelled. If that should happen, it would be the only time in the 33 years the event has been running. Since companies spend millions of dollars to showcase their products there, the GSM Association could be looking at heavy losses.

Two of the biggest names at MWC in Huawei Technologies Co. and Samsung Electronics Co., are still intending to make an appearance, and so will Xiaomi Corp. In the next few days GSM Association should come back with a green or red light.

Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns/Flickr