Is NEC shutting down its NEC Display Solutions business in the U.S.? Until NEC chooses to substantively respond to voice mail and emails I left with the company, we won't know for sure.

NEC included the above slide as a presentation accompanying its nine-month quarterly results, which will also result in 20,000 layoffs both in Japan and overseas.

The question is whether this means NEC is shutting down its NEC Display business, which officially covers projectors, LCD, plasma displays and monitors, pulling out of one or more categories, or something else altogether. NEC's corporate PR has so far refused to return calls, and the one email I received from corporate PR avoided the matter altogether. Late Friday, I was told by an external PR rep that NEC Display president Pierre Richer will speak to the matter on Monday, and that will be all until then.

At this point, I'm beginning to suspect the worst. After years of reporting in the tech industry, corporate PR generally responds pretty quickly to inquiries about a potential shutdown of a business. And it doesn't make any sense for the slide above (which I referenced in my requests for comment, naturally) to provide merely a hypothetical example of a business that could be shut down, but won't.

NEC Display Solutions markets desktop displays, both monitors and large-format digital signage; projectors; whiteboards; and new technologies including this curved display.

In its presentation, NEC also noted that "LCD decreases due to falling demand in mid-large size industry markets." No surprise there: DisplaySearch's fourth-quarter worldwide flat-panel display report already predicts sales of $124 billion will not be reached until 2014, five years later than its fourth-quarter 2007 report predicted. "Since then, a normal decline in panel pricing caused by capacity expansion has been deepened by a basic change in consumer behavior in reaction to economic problems," the report says.

We'll see what Richer says on Monday.

One other note: the other email I received back from NEC covered another comment the company made about its PC business, namely that the the company expects "greater losses from sales decrease" in European PC sales, forcing the company to consider "drastic action". "NEC is studying every possible option," spokeswoman Kosuke Yamauchi said in an email. "We will make a decision in the near future." NEC said it hopes to maintain its "No. 1 market share in Japan". The company also plans to "strengthen cooperation between PCs and mobile handsets".