Multinationals in a Competitive Environment: The Case of Philips Industries

The environment of Philips Industries may well be called competitive. The situation in which we are doing business is difficult and we use terms such as targeting and strategy to describe attack and defence. We regularly take many far reaching and important decisions, which do not only affect the cash flow and profitability, but also the well-being of our employees, the integrity of the physical environment, the prosperity of the countries in which we are operating and many factors which contribute to the quality of life. I will concentrate on the strategy we adopted to maintain our position vis-à-vis our competitors, and I will not dwell on the many applications of information technology we are using today and which we consider an operational necessity in all our business sectors.