SAN FRANCISCO - Inventories throughout the high-tech food chain are under control and look unlikely to balloon out of control over the sluggish summer months ahead of the key year-end holiday season, industry executives reported at the JPMorgan Technology Conference this week.

The comments made by chief executives and CFOs come amid growing concerns that an inventory glut in the face of potentially flagging demand will weigh on profits.

While the fourth quarter is great for electronic gadget sales because of Christmas, and firms often spend more on technology toward the end of the year to pad out annual budgets, unsold output can pile up in the intervening months.

"I don't see it as being a huge deal for us today," said Paul Reilly, CFO of electronics distributor Arrow Electronics, when asked at the conference about inventory levels. "There's no real pressure to load up on inventory or lighten up on inventory."

After the implosion of the dot-com and telecommunications investment bubbles of 2000 and 2001, high-tech companies such as Cisco Systems had to write down billions of dollars of inventory for which demand had largely evaporated.

Half a decade on, much of the industry has consolidated, there are fewer players and companies can now track demand better and manage inventories accordingly, executives told Reuters reporters.

"I don't see the inventory issues that plagued the industry in 2001 and 2002," said Peter Hayes, treasurer Solectron. "Most of the industry has better control over their inventory turns."

Avnet Inc., another major distributor of computer products, semiconductors and other electronics, also doesn't believe growing inventories will lead to a mismatch of supply and demand at the end of the slower summer months.

"We're quite comfortable today, really, across the board," Avnet CFO Ray Sadowski said. "As you look back over a number of cycles, with the bubbles that burst four or five years ago ... a lot of things have changed since then in terms of efficiencies."

Since the technology bust, companies such as Flextronics, Solectron, Jabil and others have slashed thousands of jobs and moved production to Asia and Eastern Europe.

"The market's growing probably 10% a year," said Michael McNamara, chief executive of Flextronics, referring to the overall industry. "We think it's ripe with opportunities"

While growth in traditional markets for Flextronics and rivals -- computing and telecommunications infrastructure, for example -- may have cooled, those companies are now targeting new industries that embrace outsourced production.

They are now aggressively going after the still-nascent but fast-growing automotive, industrial and medical markets.

"Non-traditional markets are big opportunities as a whole," McNamara said. "You have to be patient and your revenues will come over time."