Philips eyes bigger share of Phl market

MANILA, Philippines - Philips Lighting Philippines will bring in a new range of products this year that will give Filipino consumers more value for their money, Fabia Tetteroo-Bueno, its new country manager for the Philippines said.

Bueno started her stint in the Philippines in the last quarter of 2012 but has been studying Filipino consumers long before that.

As customers, she says, Filipinos generally have high purchase powers. At the same time, she says, there is also a great segment of society who wants value-for-money products.

 â€œBefore I arrived here, I’ve been studying the Philippines. For four months I’ve been working in understanding the Filipino consumers. What you see is that the purchasing power is going up and that’s very interesting because our products are really for consumers with higher purchase powers. But I think we are bringing them a new range of products that are what we call value-for-money products so we can get a bigger range of customers,” Bueno says in an interview.

As such, Philips Lighting will try to capture a bigger segment of the Philippine market.

 â€œWe don’t want to be only in the premium part but we also want to bring quality solutions for customers with even lower purchase powers. The purchase power is going up, but we’re going to have a bigger range of solutions to take over a bigger part of the market,” Bueno says.

As part of efforts to reach this goal, Philips Lighting will offer new products this year.

 â€œFor our consumer lifestyle range, we’re going to have new irons, new range of rice cookers, kettles, and also for lighting,” Bueno says. We’re going to have more solutions to get that broader range of consumers,” she says.

However, as Philips has been known for, Bueno says the company would maintain the quality of all its products.

 â€œWe are always going to be a quality brand. We are just going to have different levels of propositions to customers,” she says.

She cites as an example the different types of iron such as dry iron, steam iron and the more sophisticated presses.

 â€œPeople with less purchasing power want dry irons. So we just bring in a dry iron, which is a good Philips quality dry iron. We’re not going to go down on our products’ standards but we’re just going to have a bigger range of products. That’s basically our proposition,” she says.

In the lighting segment, Philips wants to help raise consumers’ awareness on what a good LED bulb is.

 â€œWe want to try marketing campaigns so customers understand what is a good LED and what is an LED that’s low quality because everybody knows already for other light bulbs. For LED, nobody knows the difference yet,” Bueno says.

An LED lamp uses light-emitting diodes as the source of light. It offers long service life and high-energy efficiency.

In the Philippines, lighting is Philips’ biggest segment (45 percent), followed by its healthcare (30 percent) and consumer lifestyle (25 percent) segments.

 â€œWe are very strong in consumer lighting and we expect more professional lighting growing and we expect also healthcare growing,” she adds.

By 2015, she says that Philips expects to further grow its healthcare and lighting segments through awareness campaigns and marketing efforts.

 â€œWe’re just following how the economy grows to see where business is going. And our expectation is really strong for healthcare and professional lighting,” Bueno says.

As a final note, Bueno says Philips is optimistic on the country’s economic prospects due to its strong macroeconomic fundamentals.

 â€œThe macro economy reflects on the micro economy. So if you see the plans they are very promising and we want to make sure that we are there for the Filipino consumers — public, private, professional consumers. So that’s why we are investing hard to make sure that we have solutions to reach more Filipinos,” Bueno says.

She says the company sees a huge potential in the Philippines because of the positive developments.

 â€œWe see a lot of potential here. So this is by far the first and biggest one. And the second one is we want to be here to bring awareness on what health and well-being is,” she says.