Frans van Houten

“At the core, Philips is an innovation company. And for innovation to work, you need to look for the unmet needs.”

“With access to professional coaching and support around the clock, patients will feel more empowered to manage their own physical wellbeing.”

“Philips is committed to the circular economy and is applying its principles throughout the organization. We are redesigning our products and looking at ways to capture their residual value.”

“Lumileds is a highly successful supplier of lighting components to the general illumination, automotive, and consumer electronics markets, with a strong customer base.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The conventional way of selling products out of the catalogue no longer works; the relationship needs to become more sticky.”

“We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture, and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.”

“Time may not be on our side, but innovation is.”

“Thanks to the digital and big data revolution, we can start to do what was previously unthinkable - to improve patient outcomes and lower healthcare costs while delivering personalized care to each individual.”

“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.”

“Government should create the environment and incentives to stimulate investment in sustainable innovation, take away barriers, and accelerate adoption, even in turbulent economic times.”

“What Philips has to offer to India is to further enhance the state of healthcare for the over billion people in this country.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Concerns about the possible side-effects of connected care are swept aside by the expectations of the benefits when people are confronted with a chronic disease themselves. Resistance that could be privacy-related completely disappears.”

“If we can keep you healthy, that is better. If you fall sick, you go to the hospital. Both sides, Philips is present.”

“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'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.”