Philips TV Sets - Televisions From Europe's Largest Electronics Maker

Philips TVs (Philips is commonly misspelled as Phillips) are manufactured by the Royal Philips Electronics company, which is based in Amsterdam, Holland. (Its HQ was moved from Eindhoven in 1998.) Philips Televisions were manufactured beginning in the 1950s. Light bulbs, and not Philips TV sets, were the company's first products, but today it is very well known for its brand name Televisions and other household electronics.

Televisions and electronics maker Philips was a key player in the development of the HDTV and DVD technologies.

Philips was established as Philips & Co. in 1891 as a light bulb factory by engineer Gerard Philips. Gerard started his company at age 32 with the help of his father, and built the first factory in Eindhoven, a town in the south of Holland.

By 1895 Philips was producing 500 light bulbs per day, and by the end of the century it became one of the largest light bulb manufacturers in Europe.

In 1914 Philips opened it famous physics laboratory and research center, NATLAB. Many important scientific contributions originated at NATLAB, including the invention of the X-ray tube in 1918.

After World War I, in 1918, Philips opened new sales operations in Belgium. And in 1927 it started manufacturing radio sets, which proved to be a great success, but the world wide depression of the 1930s curtailed the company's further international expansion.

Following Germany's invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, the Philips management fled to England, and then moved to the United States, from which they oversaw operations in those counties free from German occupation. The Philips factories in the Netherlands were mostly destroyed during World War II, but the company quickly set out to revive its production. These efforts included new moves into the home appliance market in the 1950s, and particularly into the production of TV sets.

Beginning in the 1960s Philips started diversifying its operations with numerous acquisitions and joint ventures, including the formation of the PolyGram Group, a music business started with the German electronics company Siemens in 1962, the acquisition of Grundig, a German consumer electronics company, in 1984, and the purchase of the lighting division of Westinghouse the same year.

During the 1970s and 1980s Philips faced strong competition from the emerging Japanese electronics industry, which resulted in slower sales. And after 1990's great loss of $2.2 billion, it initiated a strong cost cutting and efficiency boosting campaign, which brought it back to profitability in 1993.

After improving its bottom line in the early 90s, Philips began venturing into high risk development projects. Philips helped bring high definition televisions (HDTV) to market by developing important components of the high definition television (HDTVs) technology. High definition televisions introduced a great, long over-due, improvement in TV picture quality over standard TV sets, which are in large based on standards formulated in the 1950s. Philips was also an early developer of Internet technology for televisions, and unsuccessfully tried to enter the video game system market. In the mid 1990s Philips was a key player in the development of the DVD technology and jointly and licenses DVD related patents.

Today Philips is one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers, and Europe's largest.