What happened to Philips?

[paulsherwin]

From a British perspective, it's comforting to realise that this sort of chaotic and catastrophic corporate decline isn't a purely UK phenomenon. There are many parallels between Philips and GEC, another huge company wrecked by incompetent senior management and short-termism.

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by greg_simons

Yup, would agree with most of the content, from my perspective they wasted a lot of money on stuff that was too late into the market: v2000, or quickly superceded by different technology: digital compact cassette, i think that's why they're out of consumer electronics, got their fingers burnt too many times, i think their semiconductor business is doing fine under another badge, great shame, made a huge contribution to the electronics industry over the decades.
Greg.

Their former semiconductor busineses, even if you add them up, rank much lower than they did before. They're not even in the top 10. Though they did spin off ASML (not a semiconductor business but part of the supporting electronic mechanisation) and had some involvement in TSMC (now if they had only held on to those shares....)

As to consumer electronics, that has always been and will always be a 'you win some, you lose some' arrangement for every manufacturer so that's not really a measurement. Also, they were the Samsung of their time in many aspects. Samsung currently being living proof (and not going anywhere soon) that it's fully possible to be very sucessful in that industry - in a way that resembles what Philips used to do.

One of the much overlooked factors in the demise of VCC, actually the demise of their VHS production as well just as now the demise of their medical branch, is that from their takeover of Magnavox onwards they insist on doing business in the USA according to what they percieve as local customs and philosophy. That has never worked for them and will never work for them.

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by Sideband

As far as I'm aware, all the Small Appliance and Personal Care division has been sold off although products are still made under licence using the Philips name. They are just made to Philips spec by a different company. As far as I know that also applies to TV's.

Not exactly the same. Household stuff is still made by the same factories according to the same designs even if not under Philips ownership. The shaver factory is still owned by Philips. The TV business was spun off to Taiwanese/Chinese monitor maker TPV who have struggled to grasp TV design, especially since they did not fully take advantage of the former Philips resources, but did manage reasonable products in the end.

[DMcMahon]

Originally Posted by Maarten

Their former semiconductor busineses, even if you add them up, rank much lower than they did before.

What became of the Philips Nijmegen wafer fabs ?

Long ago I did a lot of work there, particularly at the MOS 3 & MOS 4 wafer fabs, I also did work at the Philips Caen wafer fab.

David

[Keith956]

Originally Posted by DMcMahon

What became of the Philips Nijmegen wafer fabs ?

Long ago I did a lot of work there, particularly at the MOS 3 & MOS 4 wafer fabs, I also did work at the Philips Caen wafer fab.

David

I'm not sure if the fabs are still running, but NXP is still at the Nijmegen site, I visited last May.

[red16v]

Originally Posted by DrStrangelove

Had an interview for a contract at Simoco back in 1997.

Drove across country for 5 hours and didn't even get offered a glass of water.

They wanted "commitment" from a contractor. As if. Glad I didn't get that one.

If streetview is correct there's nothing there now aside from a housing estate.

Spent 3 months in the early 2000s working for Philips at Southampton.

That site, which used to be the Mullard semicondutor factory seems to have been "repurposed" with bits of it selling cars & such like.

My Mum used to work in that factory painting the red dots on transistors. As an employee she naturally had access to the staff shop and bought the family a portable EL 3585 tape recorder. 55+years I still have it and am looking at it right now in the study (She even made a fabric cover for it). The factory used to have open days for the general public and I attended one or two. In later years I returned to the site to play evening badminton as a guest of a fellow student who was sponsored by Mullards.

You may recall Mullard's Nicholson House was named after the first (and only?) RAF fighter pilot to be awarded a VC after he parachuted and landed on the site (pre-Mullard of course) after a brave fight with a german aircraft. A plaque recognising his feat and award was put up in the buildings foyer. When the Mullard site was demolished in later years the plaque was 'rescued' and kept in a museum for safe keeping, it has since been re-hung in the Leonardo air industry supplier unit in the same spot as it was originally. A nice outcome.

[Wendymott]

When I worked for NEI in the 80's, The CE25/28 CTV's were designed by a "northern" design lab. Our component sourcing department sourced most of the semi components from Philips. We had exclusive access to a Micro controller chip, providing they supplied the firmware. That was ok "on paper", however the software bod, left the company, causing severe delays. When the IC finally surfaced, it was not a compatible code with any other controller, and our handsets were exclusive to NEI only. What a shambles.. Eventually, after a deal with Elektronica in Slovenia, we took the E5/E6 chassis, which was compatible with all the other handset codes of that time. After a couple of years the TV side of the business closed. One of our design engineers, "ex Thorn" got an applications job at Philips Semi's Southampton. Then I lost track. If Paul "R" sees this please get in touch.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by trh01uk

I worked for Pye Telecom back in the 1970s. It was then owned by Philips. I left in 1982, but after that it got rebadged as "Simoco", and then died out completely in the mid-90s I believe. That "death" was due "private mobile radio" becoming obsolete due to the arrival of mobile phones.

Richard

Very much the case: Pye's mobile-radio side got rebadged as Simoco but they never really became a big player in the VHF/UHF trunked-radio side, or the DMR stuff that wass competing in the late-90s with the likes of Motorola.

VHF/UHF mobile-radio got entirely wiped-out by the coming of cheap-and-cheerful mobile phones and SMS in the late-90s. The public-service stuff like police/ambulance/fire soon switched to Dolphin/Airwave/TETRA

see http://www.mwc.co.uk/frames_tetra.htm

a space that Simoco never seemed to get a hold of... despite fielding the likes of the D100

http://www.mwc.co.uk/frames_tetra_d100.htm

and after a few years the traditional two-way-radio market servicing vets/plumbers/car-breakdown-companies/taxis/couriers/septic-tank-emptying-trucks/gas/electricity-service vans etc was dead.

[I sold-out of the VHF/UHF two-way market in 1998, having wisely judged which way the wind was blowing].

[CambridgeWorks]

Exactly my reason for a fast exit. No way was I interested in mobile phone cutthroat business.
I had started as self employed after redundancy from Philips Telecom in 1990. I soon had a dealer account with them and at first sold their products, then Motorola. All this in the very same area I was previously covering for Philips service. Most of their customers transferred to me.
The Philips manufacturing side were only interested in production and sales to anyone, not their own sales and service organisation.
Their dealer stock was usually off the shelf. Their service and sales depots often had to wait for it to be made.
Seemed ridiculous, but I wasn't complaining!

Whether they saw the writing on the wall, who knows?
I got out in 1999 and became a full time employee once more.
With 25 days holiday, a good salary, bonus scheme and BUPA provided, it was the best move I made.
Rob

[Diabolical Artificer]

Philips and GEC, another huge company wrecked by incompetent senior management and short-termism.

Wasn't it the case at Marconi too? I remember an ex Marconi engineer saying something similar.

[paulsherwin]

Of course, GEC eventually became Marconi after much corporate musical chairs before finally going belly up.

[Cobaltblue]

The 80's were a tough time for a lot of UK businesses GEC was determined to remove competition so made a hostile takeover of Plessey which competed with GEC in Aerospace, Communications to name just a couple of areas.

GEC finally took over Plessey with Siemens as it's partner in 1988. Our division Plessey Controls) went to Siemens, something we were grateful for when GEC started to implode a few years later.

I have a VHS video of the board to employees resisting the GEC takeover I really must transcribe it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_Company

We also competed with Philips who's products were bizarre and very difficult to maintain. However they did for a short period innovate in a way the two incumbents (GEC and Plessey) did not and grabbed quite a big slice of the market before just deciding to quit the market for these products in the UK (early 1980's). The two Dutch Engineers who came over to support the products stayed and one of them still works for us.

Cheers

Mike T

[pmmunro]

There seems to be quite a few Youtube videos on this subject. This one seems quite well put together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE58YisgFeQ, but others are available.

One trend, based on entirely unscientific observation, which I think may have been significant in Philips consumer products was the vast multiplicity of models each of which seemed to have a short cycle life and to contribute little to their successors. If the international market is taken into account, this is more marked. There seem to have duplicate and uncoordinated development teams working on largely similar products.

I wonder if anyone has produced a plausible correlation between the management trend for MBAs against the demise of once powerful companies?

Maybe their techniques wouldn't work in today's world, but to the outside observer at least (customer?), ethically based, owner influenced, companies were once significant. e.g. Tektronix, Hewlitt-Packard and Philips themselves. Is pride in the product/service not perhaps at least as important as absolute maximisation of profit, or does the consumer get what they deserve in demanding lowest price?

PMM

[Cobaltblue]

Originally Posted by pmmunro

There seems to be quite a few Youtube videos on this subject. This one seems quite well put together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE58YisgFeQ, but others are available.

PMM

That's the video linked to in post #1 that started this thread.

Cheers

Mike T

[DrStrangelove]

Originally Posted by pmmunro

Maybe their techniques wouldn't work in today's world, but to the outside observer at least (customer?), ethically based, owner influenced, companies were once significant. e.g. Tektronix, Hewlitt-Packard and Philips themselves. Is pride in the product/service not perhaps at least as important as absolute maximisation of profit, or does the consumer get what they deserve in demanding lowest price?

PMM

Ah yes: HP: Management by Walking Around: how are the mighty fallen, all around is sand.

Ho hum.

It's a long way from that little garage and the HP200A oscillator.

[phildil]

At one time Philips made cinema equipment including 35mm and 16mm film projectors. We have two of their 1960s-era 35mm projectors at work, still going strong. Their DP70 projector, a dual 35/70mm machine from the mid-50s, and a wonderful piece of engineering, actually won an Academy Award in 1963. DP70s are still running at the NFT and at least one other cinema in Central London.

Philips later sold their cinema business to Kinoton in Germany, who kept the business going till about ten years back.

Check out the wonderful inventive Philips promotional films - some are on youTube - and of course there was the Evoluon exhibition: https://evoluon.dse.nl/film-e.htm

cheers
phil

[Max Ripple]

I worked for Philips briefly during the early 'seventies,and I remember enjoying the quirky innovation of many of the products.
As a company,They could alway's be relyed upon to have a different take on the design of popular equipment.
They were responsible for the compact cassette design and all those little portable recorders that were everywhere for years of course.
Later they developed(in conjunction with Sony)the compact disc system,which was of course a seismic shift in audio design.
I imagine that compaired to their medical electronics business nowaday's,the consumer market and it's "race to the bottom"mindset,is more trouble than it's worth?
Sadly they are reduced to just "badge engineering"it seems as far as tv and audio are concerned.
Nick

[davyrocket2]

I purchased my first item which was a Phillips Diga mobile phone, this was in 1998 ,it lasted for 5 years after replacing the battery for higher amp hours model. I could not help thinking that from products from TV ,Video recorders why they did not get involved with large flat screen plasma or LC type TVs . I could see similarity of situations, probably greed or lack of investment, or was senior management to blame or both ?

[Hartley118]

I guess that Philips is now called Samsung. That was Samsung’s vision, and they seem to have succeeded.

Martin

[hamid_1]

Philips started making electric light bulbs, then radio valves and X-ray tubes. This established their three main areas of business: lighting and electrical, radio and electronics, medical technology.

Philips were innovative; they brought us the compact cassette, compact disc and the first all-in-one compact fluorescent light bulb, to name just three. But I think they started to lose their way in the 1990s. The Compact Disc Interactive (CDi) and Digital Compact Cassette were both flops. Later on, Philips introduced the DVD+RW disc, a re-recordable DVD that could be played in ordinary DVD players without having to finalize it first. A great idea, let down by their highly unreliable DVDR880 DVD recorder.

Philips started selling off parts of their business, presumably to cover losses. For example Philips Semiconductors was sold off as NXP.

Eventually, Philips decided to concentrate on the medical side of the business as I suppose they saw more potential profits there than in the highly competitive consumer market. E.G. TV manufacturing was sold to TPV Electronics who licensed the Philips brand name.

Companies do rise and fall, for various reasons. Sometimes it can happen quite spectacularly, for example IBM and Nokia mobile phones. Perhaps Philips thought they had become too big and too diverse. Concentrating on just medical equipment could help restore their focus.

I hope things work out for the new, slimmed-down Philips. It would be sad to see the company disappear altogether given their history of bringing us some great products (as well as some not-so-great ones, but that's part of the fun!)