Decoder with Nilay Patel
How Philips CEO Roy Jakobs is turning the company around after major recall
16 Sep 2024
Full Episode
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Roy Jacobs, the CEO of Royal Philips, which makes medical devices ranging from MRI machines to ventilators. Philips has a long history. Their company began in the late 19th century as a light bulb manufacturer.
And over the past century and change, it's grown and shrunk in various ways. That famous light bulb business? Yeah, it was spun out into a separate company called Signify in 2018, which now makes and sells Philips-branded light bulbs like the popular Hue line.
There's an incredible history of this sort of thing at Philips, which has had a hand in basically every part of the electronics business you can think of. This is the company that invented the cassette tape. It helped to invent the CD with Sony. It's made everything from radios to generators to electric shavers. It was even a founding investor in TSMC, which now dominates chip manufacturing.
But it sold that stake in 2008, while also spinning off its own semiconductor business into what is now the very successful NXP. Basically, while every other company has been trying to get bigger, Royal Philips has been paring itself down to a tight focus on healthcare.
Roy and I talked about that and why that market is worth the focus and whether European companies have a different attitude towards size than American firms. And of course, we talked about AI. Philips makes complex diagnostic tools like those MRI machines and ultrasound systems. And there's a lot of interest in adding AI to these tools to help find medical issues earlier than ever.
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