The Demise Of Philips - How An Electronics Juggernaut Was Toppled 

And then you forget NXP. Also once part of Philips and a major player in the chip industry. In 2016 Qualcom tried to buy them for 43 billion, but a market regulator prevented that. So yes, they would have been MASSIVE.

It was good that they did it, because Phillips was too incompetent to run it.

Actually the Kodak failed at digital cameras as they were uncompetetive, however they used their chemistry knowledge to create Eastman Chemicals, which was then sold off and now Kodak is a ghost of its former self however Eastman chemicals is extremely successful. This strategy was different from Fujifilm who decided to continue in the chemicals industry and also continued to make films for lcd screens and other stuff aswell as expanding into healthcare. So while Kodak became a brand sold for scraps for others to use, the legacy of the company continues as Eastman Chemicals.

There were many more companies sold off, but these are all companies that needed agility and swift cycles to scale to the giants they are today. Philips would just hinder that. As a Dutchy i can tell you that corporately, usually its in the long game. Its not unfounded that you can trace back most of the big companies to wealth generated during the golden age 400 years ago. E.g Heineken

Funny, I have seen these exact same comments some 1-2 weeks ago but can't remember now which video that was.

Company's get founded by people with vision and after they retire you get managers as replacements. People with no vision and just look at quarterly earnings reports. There was a saying about Philips, shrinking into greatness. Every quarterly earnings report would get boosted by selling of parts of the business with the same excuse: not our core business. Good for the ceo and his options but bad for the company long term.

Many more young companies with young people who want to change everything that do not last even five years.

@@answerman9933 opposite is also true that older companies with old people end up dying out like the old people at the old companies xD

@@sambanerjee6796 Old people die, and then new people come, but they have no idea whatsoever of how to run a business, so... check the start up situation.

@@THEROOT1111 totally agree. We need some sort of a balance tbh

Interesting to hear about the story from the inside. Thanks for sharing Chuck!

I love this insight

Thank you for the insight. I suspect this is true for many other companies and has only worsened. Too many companies use what I call quarterly logic. It's all about pumping up stock values for the next quarter, not growth over the next decade.

I'm also a management consultant specializing in financial engineering and consulted with fortune 500 companies and remember Phillips was being run with an accountant's mentality. Not sure but I think the CEO back then deferred alot of decisions to finance so they were always looking at ROI and cost but spoke little about innovation and expanding markets. Somewhere along the way the company lost its spark. That being said I still have their Phillips TV and their oral hygiene is top notch. They need to think about growing adjacent business to stay relevant.

On hindsight, one can blame many "causative" factors: financial engineering or the entry of PEs; breathtaking innovations in technology; general sloth in the management of old giants; home country advantages turning into disadvantages; inability to spot new markets, etc etc. But, as they say, hindsight is 20/20. I would lay the blame to a great extent on top management, esp CEOs, who develop a "God complex". Again, on hindsight, for very large companies to stay in the game - whichever the game - all they have to do is invest and....stay. This is a lesson not just for Philips, but GE, Intel, Google, GM, Nokia, or Grundig (this, too, is a company that Philips invested in and took majority control of). It would seem commonsensical to invest in companies that appear to have some insight, have a portfolio approach but with the eye of a promoter, see where they go, bide your time, and make a play in the exact same area (by increasing the stake, buying them out, or leveraging alternatives with them) than believe you're superior and leave in a huff. Hasty divestments get you some minimal cash advantages that could cover some portion of temporal financial stress but they neither solve their fundamental problems or allow them to stay in the game. Both Xerox and Philips ostensibly fell into this and one can only blame the top leadership as the final call is made by them. History, however, is something one learns only much later in textbooks and podcasts. Companies in the here and now will continue to make the same mistakes - and I see this happening also with contemporary "brands" such as Qualcomm, Cisco, IBM, Intel, AMD, Stellantis (Fiat), Ford, etc who are navigating very complex landscapes.

And it seems that they think about stability and not constant growth. Which is literally impossible.

Smart, until you f up. And they did. They lost billions by selling a faulty breathing machines (cpap). More than a $1 billion in the lawsuit settlement, then repairs of the faulty devices, creating an improved version without those flaws and the corresponding image damage. So they are not known to making good decisions.

also anti-right-to-repair.

Yeah hospitals ripping off patients big time for years the cost for scans is absolutely absurd long after the machines been paid for. 10k for 5 minute scans.

@@SPeeSimon1 billion is chump change.

Hahaha, thank you as always Daniel!

@@LogicallyAnsweredI'm gay too buddy lol

I have a Philips TV that is amazing. Philips 707OLED, 48icnh model. Also I have a Philips Evnia 8600, I love this monitor.

​@@MiggerPlease‎

Sounds like Boeing.

@@VanillaMacaron551 ...and the stock market.

Exactly! At the end it was all about money, not the customer, not the product. Maybe the day will come that some real people with vision will lead Philips again, and that those will not be marketeers!

NXP

I still have Phillips TV and their oral hygiene products. Quality stuff. Not sure if they still make TVs but I think they're still big in Europe. What they need is new management to expand and grow the company. Right now it's being run by accountants.

@@jonfreeman9682 The TV's were spun off years ago and are now wholly owned by a Chinese company (TP Vision). I believe that oral hygiene is part of medical and lifestyle and still run by Philips.

Hahaha

🙈 It could've been worse. He could have said "the end of the second millennium " ...

😂😂😂😂❤

The guy ended up killing himself, though. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt_Tower#Incident

Yeah a longer life bulb is less efficient. The secret pact to push more replacements sales is basically just a myth.

I am unsure if halogen increases the lifespan of a bulb.

@@Karavusk The efficiency argument was just a lame excuse that some governments were happy enough to buy. The Phoebus cartel was real. It was probably legal at the time in Europe (but not in the US). Manufacturers agreed to be fined for manufacturing light bulbs that lasted longer than 1000 hours. They did not agree to be fined for manufacturing light bulbs that were not efficient.

Technology Connections RU-vid channel has an excellent video about incandescent light bulbs life span. About 10 months ago: "Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated"

@@platinaatje6134 not really complicated. The cartel was about maximising profits, not "protecting consumer interests". If short-lived bulbs had indeed been so superior, they would have won out in the market. But consumers would probably have preferred higher-wattage bulbs that did not need to be replaced all the time.

Will get wilder as we move into the 2100…

More correct I think is "the late 20th century".

I know. He could have just said, "the 90s."

😔

I still have my panasonic plasma from 2005 in my living room. Even has hdmi ports so everything hooks up to it

No, Sony TV was the best😢

Sorry, Zenith brand CRT TV sets were the best. The one I had as a child in the 80's still works along with the VHS player attached to it.

Not from my experience. The best I remember seeing from Zenith was 10 years of service with some not reaching that. We have 2 different Philips CRTs around 25 inch from 2005 that are running great and a 34 inch 2000 Trinitron that still works as well. Our 90 RCA gave 20 years of use. And my grandparents cheap late 80s Gold star color TV out lasted 3 Zeniths. Not impressed with Zenith.

Philips Mullard made the best Quality TV Cathode Ray Tubes and many types of Valves which are highly sought after. The Philips Croydon Team UK designed good designs of Colour TV s which were renown for Quality , however the Dutch Philips people cut corners on using cheaper PCB s and components . EG on the Philips G11 Chassis TV for the Frame chip they used a Plastic IC holder instead of a Ceramic one as it run so hot , plastic one did not last long, in UK they lost a big share of the TV Market and also with the loss of Visionhire 60 per cent owned by Philips they sold to Granada TV Rentals on Black Monday when shared went bad many years ago.Shame old Philips TV s were good designs. They also did not look after their dealers / agents so they moved over to Japanese Company s instead

My late Father worked for them in the UK c 1947 till retiring in 1987 he was their Trade Mark Agent. They had a huge presence in the UK - Mullard, MEL Equipment in Crawley, Pye, Philips Medical Systems etc even their own transport operation London Carriers. Sad to see how they committed slow suicide roughly from the turn of the century onwards.

Let's make things better -> let's make better things. Philips used to be run by engineers. Then the marketeers took over.

I agree; they were excellent in the 1960 ties. But the quality deteriorated dramatically afterwards. I think the shavers are still good quality.

I have their Phillips TV and their oral hygiene is second to none. They used to be huge in electronics and I remember them fondly.

You are honest. True. In home appliances. 😮

Glad it was informative Miller!

Haha, I think I now understand why some of the comments here give me a déjà-vu feeling. I am pretty sure I read your comment and the comments replying to it.

@@ronald3836 shit like that happens me all the time ha ha

The Philips brand for monitors was sold, they only produce medical gear

@@XX-ri1me AOC bought the monitor division years ago but they still maintain the PHILIPS quality.

Honestly speaking, all these consumer electronics left Western countries overall. And it is not where you can win on quality anymore.

Back in the early 1980s when I worked in computing Philips brought out the Maestro range of computing workstations which revolutionised working as a programmer. It meant that every programmer could have their own smart terminals. Prior to that you shared dumb terminals and had very little access to the mainframe having to code using coding sheets and punched cards.

They invented the laser disk, a disk the size of a vinyl LP. It didn't sell well but was a taste of the future that was soon to come with CDs and DVDs

Thanks for the suggestion Rajit!

Not the largest in any metric😂

I worked for them from 2001-2002 as an engineer. They were nice to us, but boy was there a reason they lost money.

Open up a 1970 or 1980 high end Marantz and see what's inside....

Siemens were also big in telecommunications, making large exchanges for the British Post Office. They also made PABX equipment.

High Defintion TV - Advanced TV Systems Committee. Should we be giving a shout out for NTSC - PAL - CCIR ? I'm lost now. Time to go..... ! Sad old world that it is.

Thank you as always Balpreet!

I didn't realise that valves are still used today.

@@TimothyWorel-xj9he They are because they are generally produce a much fuller and rounder sound than sold state. They are still manufactured in Russia and some former soviet countries, and China.

@@nigelduckworth4419 thank you for info.

@@TimothyWorel-xj9he They're still used in audio equipment. They have a specific type of audible distortion that many people find pleasing, and consider superior to transistors, even though they're objectively worse than transistors.

Yes, I am from Holland and I know some people working for Philips. It was a hard and sad pill to swallow. The fall of an electronics juggernaut. But, there is no money to be made in electronics anymore, at least not for a Western company. So they took the decision to ditch their core business and moved on. Indeed just like IBM. Both companies will outlast us, for sure.

Me too!

Unfortunately, I consume way more than my share of health care, and I've been noticing the names on CAT scan machines that used to be big names in consumer electronics, like Toshiba and Phillipps. I've had a bunch of opthalmology services using medical equipment made by companies that used to rely on sales of their film cameras.

NXP has changed now too, taken over by WeEn, after Qualcomm deal fell through. Hard to keep track of the changes in the semiconductor industry.

Unless your TV is old it isn't a Philips - it's a CCP special, from TPV which is owned by the Chinese State.

MBA's from USA are taught to destroy companies and move on.

😂

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Their cpaps and bipap machine are giving problems.

philips cd 960 still is a great sounding player

That's happened to many British HiFi speaker brands, now made in China with Chinese board members.

🙏

Not surprised, they usually make great products!

I remember a guy who worked for Philips in the eighties and said he would only shave with Braun.