Philips will deepen cuts at a lighting factory in Belgium and eliminate an additional 218 jobs in response to falling demand for conventional lamps and the rise of LED.
The job cuts are on top of 136 reductions announced in June, Amsterdam-based Philips said in a statement. The site in Turnhout, Belgium, 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,” Alasdair Waugh, director at the site, said in a statement. “We expect a decrease of production volumes in the next two years.”
The company is also moving two production lines to Shanghai to save costs. The cuts are part of a companywide overhaul involving 6,700 reductions to realize 1.1 billion euros in savings ($1.4 billion).
Sales of LED products at Philips rose 51 percent in Q3 and made up 24 percent of total lighting sales. The company expects 50 percent of lighting sales to come from LEDs by 2015, Guido van Tartwijk, general manager of LED Systems at Philips, said at an industry conference in Munich on Sept. 18.
