I was surprised to learn that some firms tend invest more than the given budget from the sponsor.

I learned this from Georges Lamon's website
http://www.mlink.net/~glamon/index.html

"Contrairement aux nombreuses firmes qui investissent des centaines de milliers de dollars dans leur participation, la firme australienne s’est concentrée sur le budget alloué à chaque firme pour leur participation. A défaut de budget imposant, il faut alors jouer d’originalité et de nouveauté, ce qui a manqué aux Australiens."

Now I understand why some displays have more materials (ex. Caballer 2004, Spain 2001). That explains a lot!

Anyways, I just wanted share this info for those who didn't know.

This is not as simple as it sounds. Certainly George exaggerates when he says that companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For example, it is often perceived that Eric Tucker does very large shows in Montreal and this leads people to conclude that he must invest extra money in them. However, Eric has said to me many times that he spends the budget given and not a penny more. So how to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory facts?

First of all, many companies are manufacturers so they can, if they chose, use the raw cost of the fireworks with no added profit margin. Secondly, it is often the case that the company's crew work without pay. If you take into account that there are often six people working for 40 hours or more each at La Ronde, that could add up to a significant portion of the budget if they were payed for their work. Some companies probably do pay their workers (since they may be on salary anyway).

Remember that the budget supplied is supposed to cover the cost of the fireworks - it is up to the individual companies to decide how to spend that. The companies that have it the hardest are the ones that have to buy all their fireworks from other companies.

Cheers,

Paul.