We can't think in terms of designing products that we throw over the wall to customers, but instead, we need to design products that are upgradable and maintainable and that can be mined for materials and components that can be reused.
— Frans van Houten
How can we keep people healthy, and if they get sick, how can we treat them right the first time?
We started experimenting with television in 1928. For a lot of people, Philips has a lot to do with TV.
When you try to master the emotions of a decision and say, if you're 50 years from now and you look back, 'Did we take the right decisions?' Then the decision becomes a lot easier.
Price erosion in components is quite fast. If you can capitalize on that by bringing products to the market faster, you will actually gain a better margin realization.
Lumileds is a highly successful supplier of lighting components to the general illumination, automotive, and consumer electronics markets, with a strong customer base.
A siloed approach between suppliers doesn't really help hospitals well enough.
The global healthcare industry is undergoing a paradigm shift, providing significant opportunities for Philips to deliver more integrated solutions across the continuum of care - from prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to monitoring and aftercare.
We invented television and stuck with it for 50 years, and then I decided to get out of that. I would like people to know that we are broader than consumer electronics.
We can squabble between the siblings in Europe and not be very productive and then see China and the U.S. win over the European region. Or - and this is my preferred choice - we team up together and are the strong region that we want to be, using each others' strengths and building on our commonalities to become the smartest region in the world.
You need to dismount when your horse is dead. What was relevant 20 years ago is no longer relevant today. Therefore, you need to reinvent yourself.
I am pleased with the response of investors towards Philips Lighting and the successful pricing of the I.P.O. This strategic milestone will allow Royal Philips to focus on the fast-growing health technology market.
We typically sell a catheter lab to a hospital, and it sits there for the next 10 years, and we don't visit the cardiologist on a daily basis. Volcano have a disposable business. They are in the cath lab on a daily basis.
The conventional way of selling products out of the catalogue no longer works; the relationship needs to become more sticky.
Great companies need to reinvent themselves. We can do that: we can stay relevant, we can grow, and we can stay successful. It takes courage, but it's a path we've been preparing for carefully.
It has not escaped us that other competitors have also identified health as an attractive marketplace.
Tech can help population health, make health more accessible, more affordable. Tech can also get people get more included in the economy and contribute and drive growth, and growth and wealth are great contributors to a safer world.
If we are going to get a grip on escalating costs, we have to focus more on prevention rather than acute care. Technology can help us do that.
Health care has to be delivered as an integrated service across the entire continuum of care. This runs from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis and treatment and recovery and homecare.
I came back to Philips and quickly realised that the TV business had a major performance issue and some structural challenges. Rather than try to tweak it and sit things out, we said we had to go for a structural solution.
Healthy people are not very motivated to manage their health. They just don't care.
The shift in demand is toward partners that can improve productivity, and in part, that can be done by software.
I've always flagged that it will take some time to gradually sell down our interest in lighting and basically pivot to be a medtech company focused entirely on health technology.
Philips is uniquely positioned to help reshape and optimize population health management by leveraging big data and delivering care across the health continuum, from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis, minimally invasive treatment, recovery, and home care.
We have transformed Philips into a focused leader in health technology, delivering innovation to help people manage their health.
At the core, Philips is an innovation company. And for innovation to work, you need to look for the unmet needs.
I think of the world as geographical regions, and it excites me to think about the opportunity that Europe can have if we consider it to be the 500-million-people region that it is.
I think, going forward, we need to be much more modest on expectations with regard to China growth: That's just being realistic.
The agreement to acquire Volcano significantly advances our strategy to become the leading systems integrator in image-guided therapies.
Minimally invasive surgery is the way forward: the patient goes home the next day; there are fewer complications.
We are very optimistic about our opportunities in China. Our toothbrushes continue to sell very well, while the growth of private hospitals diminishes the risk of government preferring domestic suppliers.
Having a consumer brand helps us a lot. We will see more ambulatory care, and there will be a lot of new ways to deliver healthcare... and that means consumerism is going to play a bigger role.
Our strategy is focused on driving better outcomes for patients and higher productivity for hospitals.
I remain convinced of the compelling case for connected care.
As soon as a disease is diagnosed, we still need someone to deliver the care.
Sometimes that Dutch consensus approach doesn't move you forward fast enough.
In the back of my mind was the nagging discussion: where do we take the portfolio? You can get rid of TV, fine, but then you are in lighting and in health, and those don't have a lot to do with each other.
We are addressing duplication and complexity. At the same time, we are investing more in research and development, speeding up the time to market of new innovations, and expanding our sales force in markets where growth is to be found, like Turkey, Russia, the Mideast, China, and southeast Asia.
In the Asian marketplace, we need to come out with products every nine months, not every two years.
The computer can do a much better job than the human eye, as it is much more systematic in analysing tissues.
To become the global leader in HealthTech and shape the future of the industry, we will combine our vibrant Healthcare and Consumer Lifestyle businesses into one company.
Light is one of the basic areas that will give you comfort, but it is undergoing a technological revolution in moving from conventional lighting to semiconductor-based lighting, and as it does that, it is becoming intelligent with the transition from analogue to digital.
The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.
We can only compete in the world against competitors from Asia, the United States, or wherever if we look at unmet needs.
You can't have a single design for all cities. The look and feel of the streetlights are very important.
There's much unlocked potential in Philips.
In an aging world with more chronic disease, health and healthcare are enormous opportunities that we want to focus on.
The entire dynamics of the lighting market are changing. Value is moving toward systems and services.
When you make a courageous statement, people start to follow you, and that's nice.
When I became CEO, I was really worried that we were in commoditized segments that were mature and no longer growing. So we made a radical pivot into health technology because that is one of the world's unmet needs.
