Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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)

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

They even had their own gaming console.

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 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

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).

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