Frits PhilipsFrits Philips, who has died at the age of 100 from complications after a fall on his estate at Eindhoven, in the southeast Netherlands, spent his whole working life with the great Dutch electrical conglomerate that his uncle had founded as a light-bulb factory.
He headed the organisation during the 1960s and became a virtual national institution in the Netherlands, as demonstrated by the celebration of his centenary earlier this year.
Eindhoven, still the home of the firm, is a quintessential company town. Its world-class football team, PSV, started as the Philips factory side - the initials stand for Philips Sport Vereniging (association) - and Frits was probably its most passionate supporter.
The town boasts a Frits Philips concert centre, and he was one of the founders of its technological university. For his 100th birthday, Eindhoven was renamed after him for the day and the team was temporarily restyled simply Frits. A lavish illustrated biography was published and 100,000 Fritske coins, bearing his likeness, were issued in his honour. Dutch media gave the celebrations blanket coverage.
Frederik Jacques Philips, always known as Frits, was born in Eindhoven, where his uncle Gerard had founded a factory to make incandescent lighting, then at the forefront of electrical technology, in 1891. Frits's grandfather put up the capital from his profits as a tobacco and coffee trader, landowner and banker, who financed gas lighting for his local town.
Frits's father, Anton, whose only son he was, joined his technically-minded brother a year later as business manager. It was Anton who began the expansion of the Philips company, becoming its chief executive in 1922. Eindhoven mushroomed from a small village to a considerable urban centre as the company grew, reaching a peak of 400,000 employees worldwide 50 years later, before Far East competition forced it to draw in its horns.
At the age of 18, Frits began his studies at the internationally respected technical high school in Delft. He gained his doctorate in mechanical engineering in 1929, married Sylvia van Lennep from the minor nobility of The Hague in the same year, and joined the family firm in 1930. He started as a factory engineer and soon became joint manager of the bulb plant. The company survived the economic depression of the early 1930s, and Philips developed a humane concern for the poor and the unemployed, coming under the influence of Frank Buchman, the American evangelist and eventual founder of Moral Rearmament.
As scion of a wealthy family, Philips could probably have got out of the Netherlands and avoided the appalling consequences of the German invasion of May 1940. The Dutch surrendered after just five days of fighting, brought to an end by a Nazi threat to use the Luftwaffe against defenceless cities, as demonstrated by the bombing of Rotterdam.
But he decided to stay on, hoping to be able to protect his workforce from the Nazis, and even to obstruct their inevitable determination to use the Philips plants for war production. Then, in April 1943, the occupation regime announced that all 300,000 members of the Dutch army of 1940, who had been released after the surrender, would be rounded up and sent to Germany as conscript labour. This led to a spontaneous wave of strikes. Some 18,000 Philips workers at Eindhoven - almost the entire workforce - walked out, along with miners, transport workers, teachers and even farmers, who refused to supply the dairies. For this, Philips was taken hostage for the future compliance of his employees, and spent five months in a concentration camp. The Germans also made him set up and run a camp workshop to be staffed by Jewish prisoners, and Philips made it his business to protect them as far as he could.
Of the 469 Jews forced to work there, 382 were alive at the end of the war, a far higher proportion of survivors than of the general Dutch-Jewish population, which was almost wiped out.
Israel decorated him with the Yad Vashem medal in 1995.
From 1945 onwards, Philips devoted himself to the reconstruction and expansion of the company in South America and Asia, and in many technical innovations. He became president (chief executive) in 1961; on his retirement from the top job in 1971, he became a member of the supervisory board until 1977.
Philips' wife died in 1992. Three sons and three daughters survive him. Another daughter predeceased him.
Frederik 'Frits' Jacques Philips, industrialist, born April 16th, 1905; died December 5th, 2005