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PHILIPS ELECTRONICS REINVENTS ITSELF, AGAIN

BOSTON: Philips Electronics, the Dutch industrial giant, is convinced of two things: that the proportion of the elderly in the population is growing and it is getting greener.
Those two trends are guiding the company as it continues to transform itself, reorganizing its divisions and jettisoning product lines while picking up others.
Long known as a manufacturer of Magnavox televisions, Norelco shavers, and Philips incandescent light bulbs, Philips wants to get away from home electronics and sell hospital scanning and monitoring equipment and high-tech light bulbs made with light-emitting diodes.
“We were a technology-driven company,” said Gerard Kleisterlee, the chief executive of Philips. “But that is only one element. Now we are focusing on care cycles. ‘Health and well-being’ is a common theme that everyone works on.”
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The company’s chief financial officer, Pierre-Jean Sivignon, put it another way: “An uptick in world aging and chronic diseases will drive our business.”

Amputating divisions and rehabilitation is nothing new to Philips. The company has shrunk, in terms of gross sales, by 30 percent over the past seven years, to €26.8 billion, or $37.6 billion.

It continues to shed businesses. In 2006, it sold off 80.1 percent of its semiconductor business. It reduced its share in LG.Philips LCD, a joint venture with the South Korean company LG Electronics to make television  displays.

Philips never made any head way in the low-profit-margin, increasingly commoditized television business. It announced last April that it would jettison its U.S. and Canadian television operations and license the Philips brand to the Japanese company Funai Electric in exchange for a royalty on sets sold. It has also ended television sales in Australia and New Zealand.

It did not do much better with other home entertainment products. On Jan. 1, it will stop selling DVD, Blu-ray, and home theater surround sound devices in the U.S. market. Funai will make and market the products with the Philips name.

The company will continue to sell televisions in some markets, and it will also keep selling MP3 players, shavers, toothbrushes, baby care products, home appliances and portable music accessories. Only two years ago, half its revenue came from consumer electronics, but now it is less than 43 percent.

“I could see the day when they get out of TV in Europe,” said Simon Smith, an equity analyst in London for Credit Suisse. Smith said that in this low-margin business, Philips “innovates around the edges,” to maintain profits.

Yet while the proportion of the populations of the world’s advanced economies are simultaneously aging and going green, the sudden economic downturn could change Philips’ short-term fortunes. Last month, Philips said it would lay off 1,600 health care division employees, 5 percent of its work force, because of the recession. And it is unlikely that an LED light bulb that costs more than $50 will find many takers as companies and households cut back.

Kleisterlee, the chief executive, wants to get Philips back to the size it was in 2000. “In five years, I want to grow Philips to a €30 billion business,” he said.

To get there, Philips has been making acquisitions. In the past two years it has bought 16 companies, 11 of them in the United States, including those that specialize in health care and lighting.

Philips bought Lifeline Systems, a home health care monitoring system, and Respironics, which makes equipment to combat sleep apnea and other sleep disorders. The division already specializes in medical imaging, competing against General Electric and Siemens in advanced CT, MRI and X-ray machines and claims a 40 percent global market share (50 percent in the United States) for in-patient monitoring, including ultrasound and pre-birth equipment.

Philips also sells cardiac home monitors that transmit data to a doctor’s office, home defibrillators and a variety of out-patient monitoring systems for assisted living facilities.

Lifeline, a new division, extends the reach beyond the hospital by monitoring 720,000 elderly or infirm at-home customers in the United States and Canada. It is also working with an intriguing business model. “I don’t want to sell blood pressure cuffs and defibrillators,” said Ron Feinstein, Lifeline’s president. “I want to give them away and charge a monthly fee.”

Customers paying $35 or $45 a month are given a pendant or a television set-top box that connects to Lifeline. If they experience a medical problem, they push a button on the device to summon help.

The service loses about 35 percent of its subscribers each year, mostly because of death. Nevertheless, the subscriber base has been growing about 10 percent a year. The company says it has 60 percent of the home-monitoring market in the United States.

The second part of the shopping spree secured Philips a leading position in the market for the next generation of light bulbs that will replace compact fluorescent bulbs. It bought Color Kinetics, a developer of advanced LED lighting products, and Genlyte, a lighting fixtures maker best known for its Lightolier brand.

Lighting will also make important gains in emerging markets as countries gain more income. “One of the very first things people buy in emerging markets is light,” said Sivignon, the chief financial officer.

Most of the lighting will use LEDs, or what the industry calls solid-state lighting. Philips is spending heavily. The bulk of its research and development budget, about 5.2 percent of global lighting revenue, is used for LED research.

Philips says it expects that in two years, 20 percent of its lighting sales for commercial use will come from LEDs. The company is using demonstration projects to promote its vision of lighting’s future. The London Eye Ferris wheel has been retrofitted with Philips LED products.

Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, the two-wheeled, self-balancing electric vehicle, will use Philips LED lights exclusively on an island he owns near Connecticut to cut his power consumption and create what he calls the world’s first LED Nation. Philips has also bid on a project to light the Empire State Building.

LED bulbs typically use one-tenth the power of traditional light bulbs and last up to 20 times as long. But their prices remain high - an LED that could replace a $1 incandescent light bulb or a $2 compact fluorescent bulb now costs about $60. So until sales volumes go up and prices fall, the bulbs will mostly be used in commercial settings, not residential.

“Without it,” Kleisterlee said, “we would have had a dying business. The world wants more lighting and more efficient lighting.”

This entry was posted on zaterdag, december 27th, 2008 at 3:28 am and is filed under Historie, Techniek, Geld, World on the Dutch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.