Frans van Houten

Minimally invasive surgery is the way forward: the patient goes home the next day; there are fewer complications.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

We can only compete in the world against competitors from Asia, the United States, or wherever if we look at unmet needs.

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 think, going forward, we need to be much more modest on expectations with regard to China growth: That's just being realistic.

You can't have a single design for all cities. The look and feel of the streetlights are very important.

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.

There's much unlocked potential in Philips.

We have transformed Philips into a focused leader in health technology, delivering innovation to help people manage their health.

In an aging world with more chronic disease, health and healthcare are enormous opportunities that we want to focus on.

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

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.

The entire dynamics of the lighting market are changing. Value is moving toward systems and services.

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.

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.

When you make a courageous statement, people start to follow you, and that's nice.

It has not escaped us that other competitors have also identified health as an attractive marketplace.

Our strategy is focused on driving better outcomes for patients and higher productivity for hospitals.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As soon as a disease is diagnosed, we still need someone to deliver the care.

How can we keep people healthy, and if they get sick, how can we treat them right the first time?

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.

Sometimes that Dutch consensus approach doesn't move you forward fast enough.

We started experimenting with television in 1928. For a lot of people, Philips has a lot to do with TV.

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.

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.

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.

Healthy people are not very motivated to manage their health. They just don't care.

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.

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.

The shift in demand is toward partners that can improve productivity, and in part, that can be done by software.

In the Asian marketplace, we need to come out with products every nine months, not every two years.

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

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.

The computer can do a much better job than the human eye, as it is much more systematic in analysing tissues.

A siloed approach between suppliers doesn't really help hospitals well enough.

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.

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.

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.

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

Even though we live in a fast-changing world with short term-ism all around, it requires years of determination to transform a company and structurally reap the rewards. Innovation companies need to set their sights on solving unmet needs - but this approach requires focus and long-term tenacity.

Indeed, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will greatly lead to increased consumer health awareness and self-management and will enable individualized treatment pathways supported by tele-health care and coaching.

We knew we could put the company on the right side of history by decisive transformative action and by redefining our purpose to improving people's lives through innovation.