Tech customers still slashing budgets.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Silicon Valley's tech companies may not have faced the worst of their decline yet, if a new poll of their major customers _ the chief information officers at large corporations _ proves true over the next year.

The poll, scheduled for release Friday, shows that in May, CIOs were still slashing their budgets for buying high-tech equipment and software over the next year, primarily because their corporations are financially squeezed right now.

Instead of spending 7.2 percent more on tech goods, as they estimated in April, they now think they'll only spend 3.8 percent more. That's down dramatically from the 19 percent annual budget increase they were expecting last November.

"There's nothing in the data to show we've hit bottom," said Edward Yardeni, chief investment strategist at Deutsche Banc Alex Brown Securities, who produced the poll with the Massachusetts-based CIO magazine. "The results show that the so-called `tech wreck' is hardly over."

The poll was developed as a leading indicator for the direction of tech capital spending, the most significant ingredient of demand for Silicon Valley's Internet equipment, software and computers. It shows that the decline in spending has come in two waves, first in January and February and again from March through May.

Among those polled, 260 CIOs responded. Among the findings, corporate CIOs have:

_Drastically cut the amount of business they expect to do electronically. Last August, they expected nearly a quarter of total corporate revenues to come over the Internet or through electronic exchanges. In May, they expected only 10 percent.