Fair bosses said that starting 2011 there would be greater effort to attract individual consumers.

"We are going on the offensive," said Ernst Raue, board member of Deutsche Messe AG, which staged the five-day display.

Since 2001, when the fair achieved its peak number of exhibitors at 8,093, there has been a steady fall in the number to this year's total of 4,157.

No figures for attendance this year were available, but the number last year was down 20 percent to 400,000. Some three quarters of a million visitors attended the fair when it was at its most popular.

Although the event is still the world's biggest IT and telecommunications fair, it has so far focussed on business software.

Consumers are the future

Organizers say that future fairs will be divided into four sections. There will be one part dedicated to business applications, another for the public sector, one for research institutions and one - named CeBIT Life - focussing on the private consumer and internet.

According to Raue, consumers are increasingly the driving force on the market.

"If we didn't seize on that then we would cut ourselves off from the future," he said.

Visitors this year would have already seen some of the changes planned for next year put into effect, with more than 1,000 presentations, discussions and a greater emphasis on new trends.

The event's origin is rooted in the Hanover Messe, the industrial trade fair that first opened a hall for computers in 1970. As computing grew in popularity, the IT section of the exhibition became a show of its own in 1986.

rc/dpa/AP/Reuters
Editor: Toma Tasovac