Technology leaders gathered at the annual Comdex trade show here note that semiconductor sales are rising again. Many tech stocks are at their highest levels in almost two years. Job cuts, while still mounting, are starting to slow.

And big companies, which sidelined technology purchases when the economy soured, are finally starting to consider replacing their aging PCs and other equipment.

"You've got a lot of companies out there with really old populations of computers," Michael Dell, chairman of the world's biggest computer company, said in a brief interview. "We're starting to see some replacement occur"Business," he said, "is improving."

Dell is an eternal optimist when it comes to his company. But the numbers are beginning to back up the anecdotal evidence.

PC sales in the third quarter rose 14 percent worldwide and 19 percent in the United States, according to research company Gartner Inc. Many tech companies are predicting strong sales during the holiday shopping season as consumers scoop up digital cameras, MP3 music players and other computer gadgets.

Sales of semiconductors, the building blocks of virtually every high-tech device, rose sharply in recent months, according to Gartner. As a result, semiconductor sales are expected to be up almost 12 percent this year from a year ago, and rise an additional 20 percent next year.

Job cuts are starting to slow. In a report to be released today, the electronics industry trade group AeA predicts that while tech-industry job cuts will total 234,000 by the end of 2003, this year's job cuts -- most were made early in the year -- are less than half the 540,000 jobs shed by tech companies in 2002. That is seen as a sign that the carnage in tech employment is finally near an end.

"Basically 2002 was a disaster," said AeA President Bill Archey.

But recent signs of improvement in the tech sector -- and the rest of the economy -- give Archey and others a sense of optimism they haven't had in a few years.

"I think we're going to see in 2004 an uptick in jobs," Archey said. "We're going to go back into the positive. You can just feel it."

But nobody is predicting a return to the tech heyday of the late 1990s.

By: DocMemory
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