Frans van Houten is CEO of Royal Philips, a position he has held since April 2011. As CEO, he is also Chairman of the Board of Management and the Executive Committee. He is passionate about innovation, entrepreneurship and business transformation to drive competitiveness and customer value.
Frans van Houten, who joined Philips in 1986 as a sales and marketing officer, was appointed as the CEO of the company in 2011, thanks to his experiences at Philips. Frans van Houten, who has been the CEO of Philips, one of the largest electronics companies in the world, for 11 years, has strengthened its power in the global market by successfully managing the company's activities in more than 60 countries. Houten, who was included in the Top 20 Global Business Leaders list by Fortune magazine in 2017, aims to make the Philips brand the world leader in health technology by 2030 and to provide health technology services to 3 billion people a day.
Frans van Houten was born on April 26, 1960 in Eindhoven, Netherlands. After studying economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, he earned a master's degree in business management. He joined Philips in 1986 as a sales and marketing officer. In this period, Philips was consolidating its power in the world market with many innovative inventions that facilitate the processing, storage and transmission of digital data in video and audio technologies. The Philips brand, which was founded in 1891, had become one of the most important technology companies in the Netherlands under the management of Anton Frederik Philips. His work on optical telecommunication systems in the 1980s created the compact disc (CD) technology, which is still in use today.
In the 1980s, the number of televisions Philips sold exceeded 100 million annually. During this period, Frans van Houten was drawing the attention of his superiors with his success in the sales and marketing department of the company. Entering the healthcare industry in the 1990s, the company adopted a completely people-oriented approach in its product design processes. According to Houten, the health technology market was still an emerging market, unlike the television and electronic products market, where there was a lot of competition. If the Philips brand could act in a planned manner by making the right investments in this area, it could become a world leader in the future.
The decision of Philips to grow in the field of health technology accelerated the rise of Frans van Houten in his career. During his studies in economics and business management at Erasmus University, Houten realized that simply designing a good product was not enough for market leadership. Medical devices developed by Philips were easy and convenient for both patients and clinicians. However, the main factors that will bring Philips leadership in this market are the company's competitiveness, entrepreneurial spirit and adaptability to business transformation.
In 2002, Frans van Houten became co-chairman of the company's consumer electronics division. During this period, Philips made very important breakthroughs in technological innovation. Developed through the partnership with Sony, DVDs, beyond offering a new product to the market, represented a brand new technology in the processing, storage and transmission of digital data in image and audio technologies. According to Frans van Houten, Philips, which carried its previous experiences in compact disc technology to the next level with DVDs, could rise to the leadership in the field of health technology if it used these experiences effectively.
During his tenure as co-chairman of consumer electronics, Houten spearheaded the pivotal work of pulling Philips out of other markets to better focus on healthcare technology. The most important of these was the completion of the business transformation process of Philips Semiconductors, which took over the production of semiconductors that Philips needed for electronic products.
Under Frans van Houten, Philips continues to pull out of other areas to grow in the healthcare technology market. Houten, which enabled Philips to withdraw from the audio and video technology market in 2014, held the public offering of Philips Lighting in 2016. It has also partnered with companies such as Volcano and Spectranetics, leaders in medical devices, to grow in the health technology market. It brought the corporate customer portfolio of these companies to Philips. Houten, who was included in the Top 20 Global Business Leaders list by Fortune magazine in 2017, aims to make Philips the world leader in health technology by 2030 and provide health technology services to 3 billion people a day.