During the week of one of the biggest electronics components trade fairs in the world, which took place in Munich a couple of weeks ago, you would be hard-pressed to see where were the signs of the down-turn that we’d been hearing about for several weeks.  OK, so visitor numbers were down by about 6,000, hitting around 72,000, but for anyone who was there it was both difficult to get hotel rooms, and book travel to get there in the first place, unless you’d booked months or even a year or more prior to the event.

So what’s the story?  Why didn’t we see everyone drowning their sorrows at the show or whingeing about the bleak future? And is it really bleak or is there a silver lining? 

Well there could be many reasons for the enthusiasm at the trade fair – for example, the financial markets feel the impact straight away, but in areas like technology businesses, where the design cycle (the time it takes from initial concept of a design to actually producing the product) can be anything from several months to several years, so the filter-through to all parts of the value chain could still take a while longer.

If you listen to the CEOs of the technology companies though, then the story is very similar across the board: we’ll see a dire 2009, and the downturn may even linger into 2010, but there are many opportunities within this period.

For example, Harriet Green, CEO of Premier Farnell, a company that had sales of £745 million in its last financial year and is a distributor of electronic components and industrial products globally, said that the recession would be quite deep among the developed countries and last well into 2009 and maybe even 2010, but that she is excited about the opportunities that this presents.

She thinks that growth over this period will come from China, Eastern Europe, and probably India, commenting, “The Chinese have laid out a very detailed plan around liquidity and exports, real estate and development in rural areas. They are already quite well advanced in spending their five trillion dollars to keep their economy strong. I am quite excited about the opportunities we started two years ago developing our engineering and web capabilities there.”

Green believes that the next three years is going to be one of quite considerable change and challenge and is excited about the opportunities from internationalization in China, India and Eastern Europe, and also the web.

She thinks that the web is a place where we have yet to see more new developments – for example, in the tech field, engineers doing more collaboration over the internet, and in particular, evolving these possibly over and beyond some of the social networks. There will be a lot more around customization and personalization on the web.  She says that you only have to look at the trends we can see already among young engineers – and the average age of a design engineer in China is 27 – who live their lives around social networks.

So maybe we will see the work environment evolving on top of the social environment. Maybe corporate organizations will embrace social networks and build their own applications on top of these specifically for their own companies or associations or networks?

Another interesting view of the opportunities in 2009 was from Dave Bell, president and CEO of Intersil.  This is a company that makes chips for displays, recordable media like CDs and DVDs, and power management (for the batteries in your gadgets).

He said that the downturn of 2009 will be a great year for companies that want to acquire smaller companies within their sector to give them an advantage in areas where they may need to add key technologies or competencies. So instead of going to a VC (venture capitalist) for money, don’t be surprised if small start-ups go to large corporate and get acquired by them

The interviews with these and other CEOs can be found on the Technology Leaders TV web site, which interviews the movers and shakers from the technology industry to allow them to give their views in their own words.

While news of acquisitions, tie-ups, and consolidation may be good for India Inc., will it actually mean anything for driving innovation? Or will the story continue to be an evolution of India’s past – of taking technology from other parts of the world and simply re-assembling it? In this blog/column ‘Nitin’s tech view’ aimed at Indian electronics industry professionals and eengineers, there is a perspective that says India now needs to move on and maybe drive innovativion rather than simply implementing ‘screwdriver technology’.. Click here to read the column.