A dream come true

In 1930, having just completed his military service, he went straight into ‘the firm’ as an industrial engineer. This to the evident satisfaction of all concerned: having fulfilled management positions in both the Philite (plastics) Factory and the Engineering Works, he was appointed as Assistant Managing Director in 1935. His father expressed his pride in a letter to a friend: ‘Frits is very active; two years from now, when I retire, he will be ready to become one of the managing directors…’.

Two events that took place in the early thirties were to prove highly influential for Frits Philips’ thoughts and actions in the years to come. In 1931, a dream he shared with every young engineer of his generation came true: a trip to America, a country that ‘in the preceding decade had overtaken Europe in manufacturing methods’, as he wrote in his memoirs. That was not all he found there. The young Frits was also deeply impressed by what he saw as a young nation of immigrants filled with an indomitable urge to get ahead: ‘In ‘God’s own country’ they (the immigrants from Europe, Ed.) were accepted as citizens at once. Their children were taught at school that America was the land of the future, where anybody could have a fair chance provided he was willing to work hard and learn a trade.’

The trip also opened his eyes to a far less appealing truth. In America’s capitalist society, the economic recession of the thirties left deep social scars. Frits Philips was shocked: ‘I saw factories in which only one in three machines was working! On the street corners people were selling apples in order to earn at least something. In that hard country, where social benefits such as unemployment relief were unknown, people were thrown into abject poverty.’

This emerging captain of industry was never to lose sight of the needs of the less well off. The social consequences of the Depression in the 1930s shaped his approach to business throughout the rest of his career. Around the time that Frits Philips returned to the Netherlands, the Great Depression reached Europe. N.V. Philips’ Gloeilampenfabrieken, which in 1931 was actually producing far more than just light bulbs, was hit hard. Sales diminished, orders ceased and the exchange rate dropped. Managing Director Anton Philips had no option but to dismiss workers. By 1933 only 16,000 of the 28,000 employees were left.

Several men who had been given notice requested an interview with Frits Philips, then manager of the Philite factory. ‘They were then at least able to tell their wives that they had done all they could. The fact of the matter was, though, that in the face of the depression I was as powerless as anybody else. I could only sympathize and be available as a listening ear, which must have been small consolation. (…) After the Depression of the thirties, I determined that in the rest of my industrial life I would do everything within my power to avoid a recurrence of that kind of misery.’
A little more than ten years later the time came to prove himself true to his word, in by far the worst and most dramatic crisis of the twentieth century: the Second World War.