Philips to lay off 4,000 jobs as its sales fall

Royal Philips NV, a Dutch multinational corporation, revealed this week that it would be laying off thousands of employees worldwide. The company said it was forced to do so due to the plunging sales and other issues.

Philips said it would cut five percent of its workforce, and this is equivalent to about 4,000 people. The company's chief explained that this move is part of a scheme to combat the falling sales, which were partly due to the recall of its sleep apnea machine and eventually taking a massive hit from this - amounting to €1.3 billion.

The job cuts were revealed by Roy Jakobs, Philips' current chief executive officer, during the recent performance report for the third quarter of 2022. He confirmed that they had faced many challenges, and the Q3 report shows this.

Fox Business reported that the firm has 80,000 employees, and eliminating a small percentage is needed for the company to survive and for Philips to achieve its growth potential. It was noted that the firm incurred huge losses after recalling its Respironics Ventilators and other machines due to health risks.

These devices were sold around the world, and millions of units were already distributed, so the impact on the company was great. With this, Philips is expecting to see a mid to single-digit comparable sales decline in the last quarter of this year. As per Reuters, the job cuts may be worldwide but will mostly affect workers in the United States and the Netherlands.

"My immediate priority is to improve execution so that we can start rebuilding the trust of patients, consumers and customers, as well as shareholders and our other stakeholders," Royal Philips CEO, Roy Jakobs, said in a press release.

He further explained, "We will do this by first further strengthening our patient safety and quality management and addressing the various facets of the Philips Respironics recall by urgently improving our supply chain operations and simplifying our way of working to improve productivity and increase agility and this includes the difficult, but necessary decision to immediately reduce our workforce by around 4,000 roles globally."