The week-long event opening Thursday in the northern German city of Hanover will showcase the latest gadgets from some 6,270 exhibitors, with a record number of Asian firms on hand.

The CeBIT comes just as the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO) forecast a healthy 4.3 percent boost in sales this year in the global IT and telecommunications sector to 2.04 trillion euros (2.68 trillion dollars).

"The ICT (information and communications technology) markets have definitely emerged from the tunnel of the deep crisis of 2001-2003," EITO chairman Bruno Lamborghini said last week in Brussels.

Meanwhile German companies, which make up the bulk of CeBIT exhibitors, say their three-year crisis is over, with 3.4 percent growth in turnover expected this year to 136 billion euros.

Growth last year reached just 2.5 percent.

"Our target for the future is to grow twice as fast as the rest of the economy," said Willi Berchtold, president of the German computer, telecommunications and new media association BITKOM.

German gross domestic product is expected to expand by about one percent this year.

Ernst Raue, one of the organizers of the fair, said the CeBIT was making a comeback after a few rocky years, noting that the number of Asian companies at the event had doubled since 2001 thanks to the booming regional IT sector, with a 10-fold increase in the number of Chinese firms participating.

The main drivers of growth this year are expected to be third-generation mobile phone services, high-speed Internet access and wireless technologies, according to EITO.

The new mobile phones based on UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) will take center stage in Hanover.

Offering mobile high-speed Internet connections, video capability and other multimedia features, UMTS phones are expected to be in increasing demand as consumers come to expect more services while they are on the move.

But the industry has as yet failed to develop the "killer application" to make years of development and billions of dollars in investment finally pay off.

Also being showcased are "convergence" products, devices that wed IT, telecommunications and consumer electronics features into all-in-one gizmos.

These include products that blur the boundaries between a computer, a television, a mobile phone and a personal digital assistant.

The fair will also feature a few highly awaited premieres.

Vodafone is to unveil a UMTS handset prototype that can show live digital television.

Europe's biggest online service provider T-Online is set to introduce new software for Internet telephony, offering a low-cost alternative to the service provided by its parent company, Deutsche Telekom.

And Germany's Frauenhofer Society, the people who developed the MP3 music compression system, will present a digital companion that allows patients to be monitored when they leave hospital and mini-computers equipped with sensors for emergency workers to automatically transmit information back to their base.

More than 6,200 exhibitors have registered for this year's fair, about 160 more than last year but a far cry from the record 8,106 that came in 2001.

Most are from Germany with nearly 3,000 companies represented, followed by Taiwan with 777 firms registered, China with 310 and 209 from the United States.

Despite the new-found optimism in the industry, the number of visitors to the CeBIT has fallen steadily since 2001, when 850,000 people attended.

Around 500,000 visitors are expected this year, up slightly from the 489,230 who came in 2004.

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