Job cuts announced at Philips

Philips Electronics announced it would deepen cuts at its manufacturing facility in Turnhout, Antwerp province, and eliminate an additional 218 jobs in response to falling demand for conventional light bulbs and the rise of light-emitting diodes, reports Bloomberg Businessweek. The job losses come on top of 136 reductions announced in June, Amsterdam-based Philips said in a statement yesterday. The site in Turnhout has 1,533 employees and makes high- pressure discharge lamps for sport stadiums and stores. “The need to focus on cost efficiency is becoming more and more important,” said Alasdair Waugh, senior director at the site. “We expect a decrease in production volumes in the next two years.” Philips, the world’s largest producer of lighting equipment, is also moving two production lines to Shanghai to save costs. The cuts are part of a company-wide overhaul involving 6,700 reductions to make savings of €1.1bn. Sales of LED products at Philips rose by 51 percent in the third quarter and made up 24 percent of total lighting sales. The company expects 50 percent of lighting sales to come from LEDs by 2015, said Guido van Tartwijk, general manager of LED Systems at Philips, at an industry conference in Munich last September.