Philips Plans 6000 Job Cuts; Sees Growth in FY25, Beyond | Hacker News Reader

Philips Plans 6000 Job Cuts; Sees Growth in FY25, Beyond

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76 pointsbelter41 comments

I feel bad for the employees getting let go, but I have a deep hatred for the company itself. My Philips Dreamstation CPAP device got recalled in May of 2021 by the FDA because it potentially uses toxic foam (Philips denies this of course); this is a device I use every night to breathe BTW. I have one of the first models they released and I also filled out a "priority request" informing Philips of my other medical conditions which require a more urgent replacement. We're coming up on nearly two years now and I've yet to see the replacement device. My recall is still "processing".

I've heard their defibrillator devices also have issues functioning correctly and many "refurbished" models are available. A refurbished device meant to restart your heart from a company known to botch healthcare devices... what could go wrong. Honestly I think this company needs to be blacklisted by the FDA.

Somewhere around ten years ago, one of their large offices was basically forced by the FDA to temporarily stop normal operations and have everyone drop all work to start processing their massive, years-long backlog of customer complaints that they were legally required to process in a timely fashion but had been ignoring instead. I'm not sure whether they actually changed any processes after that.

Sorry to read that. What other company has good CPAP machines ?

I thought the medical branch of philips was solid.. it seems even there it's easy to fool people with branding.

My ResMed is really good.

Resmed is pretty solid, but their new AirSense 11 machines have been getting an increasing number of complaints for smaller stuff like reduced humidifier capacity or weird noises. I think the supply chain issues in the last few years have increased quality problems across the board for manufacturers of pretty much everything (cars, med devices, etc.), so that may be a reason to stay away from the newer stuff. The AirSense 10 PAP machines are very reliable and their earlier machines even more so (I had one before my Dreamstation). Resmed also makes the best masks (in my opinion) on the market.

I can definitely recommend my ResMed. Quiet and effective. If not covered by insurance, I hear they are ~$400. I've been using one for about 2 years. Quality of sleep has improved dramatically.

Coming from someone in healthcare IT, I was really pleased with how well the sleep lab hardware and software worked (Philips Sleepware/Alice/etc) and stuck with Respironics just because of the good quality of it all.

Man, did I get burned with my Dreamstation 1 and my Dreamstation Go. I refused my DS1 replacement* because I already de-foamed my current machine, and now my humidifier's died (which they don't replace anyways) so I ended up buying a Fisher&Paykel external humidifier just to have something more reliable.

* (I would have been happy had they given me a Dreamstation 2 like they did SO MANY of the recalled machines, but instead I was proffered a refurbished DS1 which was frustrating - what was the rhyme and reason of who got new DS2s and old DS1s? I had full prioritization data available and was considered a high-priority replacement user.)

The great gag with the Dreamstation Go recall is they still haven't even come up with a valid fix, as far as I was told -- and I'm a day 1 recallee.

I really wish they would put this as a percentage of total employees.

"The new reorganisation brings the total amount of job cuts announced by new Chief Executive Roy Jakobs in recent months to 10,000, or around 13% of Philips' current workforce." -- https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/philips-scraps-6000-j...

Looks like 13% according to this https://layoffs.fyi/ Never mind.. missed the 13% part on that 2nd line

Does Philips have any high margin business units left other than healthcare?

Back in the day, they used to be cutting edge in magnetic and optical media, LCD tech and semiconductor tech, but these days, we have lights, shavers, kitchen appliances and what I assume are Chinese OEM clock-radios and TVs with a Philips logo on them, all relatively low-tech, low-margin white goods.

They spun off all their most lucrative and innovative businesses, NXP Semiconductors and ASML, each now worth significantly more than Philips which is following a very similar path to the famous RCA which was an innovator in electronics and semiconductors and is now in the grave.

It feels like a dying company in a free fall way before these job cuts were announced, and their stock price reflects it.

Edit:

>On 16 August 2022, Phillips announced that they had parted ways with CEO van Houten due to a medical product mass recall that halved the company's stocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_van_Houten#cite_note-9

yeah it's crazy. They invented the compact cassette player, the VCR AND the CD.

They even had their own gaming console.

The produced some lighting for reef aquariums which is a high margin market. But they lost a distribution deal with the largest retailer in the game so they're almost impossible to buy these days.

Which is a real shame, because they're damn good lights. One of the few high output lights with no moving parts, entirely passively cooled. Given that people tend to drop $500-$1200 per light and most aquariums require 2-3 lights, and they tend to fail in a few years due to salt corrosion destroying their fans, they were a godsend.

But yeah, dropped the ball on trying to sell it and can't really find it anymore.

Link to the light: https://www.coralvue.com/philips-coralcare-gen2-led-light-fi...

The lighting department split off from Philips about 2 years ago. They now go by the name "Signify", if memory serves (check... it does, signify.com).

Unfortunately, that coincided with a refocus on B2B. So I don't know if they sell aquarium lights.

A better question is do they have any business left other than healthcare? I think they sold off everything else. Every other Philips product you still see is a licensing deal or a company that was spun out. Lighting is Signify, the televisions are TCL and so on.

Yep, that's the pattern. Anything that's successful they spin out almost by default. That makes Philips the company look not so great, but if you merge back in everything that's been spun out they're not doing so bad.

Maybe Hue lights? They’re pretty much the best of the best for smart lights. Although Matter may shake things up.

Are they better than the IKEA version?

I can't recall for certain, but I think the Hue lights are brighter than IKEA's Tradfri lights. Certainly the newer 1100 lumen (max) ones should be. There's also the issue that the Tradfri lights have absolutely abysmal color replication, where green is some kind of weird lime color, blues are oddly cyan, etc. Hue is much better on that front.

I also think hue has a wider variety of bulb and plug-in options, which is nice since you have to stick with a single brand to get consistent colors. I don't think IKEA has an RGB bulb for GU10 fixtures, or pot lighting options, for example.

Other than the actual lights, though, I don't bother going with Hue products. They're generally overpriced, at least as far as I can tell.

Doubt it, there's much (cheaper) competition in that space.

Maybe rich Californians can afford to put Hue in their entire houses because everyone I know (in EU) saw Hue prices and said pass.

Hue is made by Signify (formerly philips lighting), not part of Philips anymore (though they probably own a good bit of stock in signify).

I suspect any meaningful talent has seen the writing in the wall

Also probably explains the latest fuckups in their healthcare products. But hey I'm sure subcontracting works fine!

(But for real, this are sad developments, based on their history)

I was just watching a great Philips corporate documentary from the late 1970d about hey they made color televisions and was thinking about how innovative and high tech the company was back then:

https://youtu.be/2jJm65mQWR0

So basically, Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy wins again?

This pattern plays again and again. I wish there was a way to plot a simple approximative index of ratio of the first type to that of the second type, then you could get a read in where a given company is at.

I read this as "We forecast growth, but instead of retraining and helping our loyal employees, we're laying them off for some short term savings for shareholders"

"Oh, and our CEO still gets a bonus" and frequently (not sure if that's the case here) "we're still paying dividends the shareholders/buying back our own stock".

Fuck em all.

My Hue hub broke, turned out to be impossible to move the lights to a new hub. I don't like Philips anymore.

I was going to suggest using this package a friend built (a long time ago) but looking at it, it does seem to expect there to a hub, and it probably expects the lights to be associated to that hub

https://github.com/issackelly/python-hue

It's not really impossible, just a big pain in the butt. You should be able to connect using the SN.

Yeah, I had to do something similar for this. It requires the switch on/off dance, then extremely close proximity.

I have some bulbs on an 6 meter ceiling. I would get pissed if I have to re-pair those with the hub.

I believe the standard approach is a smartphone duct-taped to a hockey stick.

(not defending it, but holy crap some of this tech wasn't well thought through)

That hasn't been part of Philips since 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signify_N.V.

You should be able to turn them off and on 6 times to force them into re-pair mode. I'm not sure if it's part of the Zigbee standard, but every Zigbee light I've had has worked like this.

In fact you can ditch the hub completely and just talk to all your bulbs and other Hue devices with a $10 ZigBee USB adapter. There are loads of python scripts online to provide all functionality the bulbs normally have, and more.

You can reset hue bulbs into zigbee pairing mode. I don't know about the repeated on-off cycle method, but a hue dimmer remote will also do it.

You can reset them with the Hue Bluetooth app, and the dimmer switch. I have done this many times successfully. I think it is a great product.

seems like they have about 80,000 employees at the moment https://www.philips.co.uk/a-w/about.html

the grand IT tech cycle (1995-present) is flattening out

markets are crowded and saturated, most participants are just doing replacement business (for example, Lenovo, Apple, Samsung selling replacements to people who already purchased their products)

it takes fewer people to maintain a business than to build one

there just isn't as much work to do, and what is remaining is quickly being automated and/or commoditized

tl;dr: you may not be needed

> tl;dr: you may not be needed

In tech, anyway. Apparently we have a big shortage of electricians and plumbers.

Meh, reports of tech’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Doesn’t this take strike you as reactionary? Will this be true in 3 years, in 5?

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