Philips, the Dutch giant, used to routinely fly 600 employees to the Consumer Electronics Show. This year, reportedly, there are two.

The company, which last spring decided to license off Philips and Magnavox brands for TVs in North America to Funai, held no press conference and purchased no booth space on the show floor.

Cisco, another giant -- with expanding business in the connected digital consumer world -- was nowhere to be seen on the CES show floor, although it grabbed a few meeting rooms and held a press conference.

One technology supplier who usually comes here to meet with important customers -- 12 in total -- found only three of them present. The rest cancelled.

CES President Gary Shapiro looked out at the audience for his opening keynote session and, for the first time in his ten-year reign, saw empty seats in the room.

Executives, engineers and marketers in the electronics industry are huddling on show floors and hallways at the CES, comparing notes to find out how others are coping with the economic crisis.

Jean-Laurent Poitou, managing director for electronics and high tech at Accenture, said everyone wants to know not only how others are reacting, but also where and how they are cutting costs.

During a downturn, Poitou said hard-hit businesses that invest strategically tend to show more sustainable growth over the following six to eight years. "Let's be careful. The strategy shouldn't be, Let's cut the cost across the board indiscriminately," he warned.

But for many technology suppliers, the issue goes far beyond cost-cutting measures.

Christos Lagomichos of NXP Semiconductors

"We can control cost. We can control strategies. But we cannot control the end market's demand," said Christos Lagomichos, executive vice president and general manager of NXP Semiconductors' Home Business, during an interview here on Thursday (Jan. 9) with EE Times.

Hurting most, said Lagomichos, is the industry's unpredictability. "Customers don't know what will happen." Unable to see ahead, they offer only "short-term" projection figures to suppliers.

Lagomichos added, "I've talked to everyone, including my friends at STMicroelectronics and Broadcom. They all say that they've not seen anything like this before." If it's any consolation, he mused, "at least, we are not the only ones."

Scale game

Keenly aware of the current economy and NXP's position on the market today, Lagomichos stressed that "scale is the key."

In tough times like this, "Technology is important [but] scale is the key driver," he said.

Mergers and acquisitions will be rampant and "smaller guys are forced to be consolidated." Putting it more bluntly, Lagomichos added, "There are just too many guys [in the digital consumer segment] and nobody is making money."