Hanover, Germany - Exhibitor bookings for a major computer-industry trade fair, CeBIT in Germany, have slumped 25 per cent as the worldwide recession bites, the main organizer said Friday.

Ernst Raue, a director of the Deutsche Messe company who has oversight of CeBIT, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur that 4,300 booths had been booked at the March 3-8 fair, which in the 1990s was the world's biggest computing show.

Even before the recession, the fair in Hanover was in decline, with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in the Nevada capital Las Vegas in January and Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week gaining importance as first-half-of-the-year events.

In volume terms, the 200,000 square metres of exhibition space booked at CeBIT was down 20 per cent from last year.

He said the typical stay-aways were small makers of components, computer hardware and telecoms products from China, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong.

"There is tremendous competition there and the crisis has made it even fiercer. A lot of the companies have gone out of existence," he explained. He said two of Japan's biggest companies in the industry, Toshiba and Kyocera, had decided not to exhibit at CeBIT.

Raue was upbeat, saying, "In a time of world economic crisis, 4,300 exhibitors amounts to a success. But companies that have reduced marketing budgets to zero will not be attending at all this year, since marketing is where they make savings first ."

He said some companies which had skipped CeBIT in the past were back this year. They included Dell, Intershop of Germany and Nokia Siemens Networks.

Deutschen Messe AG, which operates the fairgrounds in Hanover, also runs the annual Hanover Fair, an industrial plant expo, every April. The two fairs are the principal annual events on the site. (dpa)