Brothers Gerard and Anton Philips founded the company now known as Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Royal Philips Electronics) in 1891. That company largely made its fortune making incandescent light bulbs before moving into vacuum tubes, semiconductors, consumer electronics and medical equipment. 
And now Frans Otten (pictured left) and Warner Philips (right), great grandsons of Anton Philips, are hoping that Lemnis Lighting BV (s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands), which is being incubated by their company, Tendris Holding, will create another fortune with a solid-state light bulb that uses light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
Besides Tendris, the other major shareholder in Lemnis is John Roojimans, the Dutch engineer that developed and patented the high brightness LED at the heart of the company's lighting systems.
Philips and Otten, along with two others, formed Tendris Holding in 2002 to invest and incubate startups around the theme of lowering carbon dioxide emissions.
Lemnis' first product is a heat-sink ringed 40 watt-equivalent retrofit bulb that sells for $39, down from $59 a year ago, pitted head-to-head with compact fluorescent and tungsten-type bulbs.
"We don't advocate replacing all bulbs in the home with ours, but where it makes sense, where you have a 40-W bulb now, you can use an LED bulb," said Frans Otten who spoke to EE Times from China in a telephone interview.
"We think there is a real opportunity for a startup to emerge in the LED lighting market. You cannot enter the existing lighting market if bulbs have to be replaced every few months. The distribution network needed for that is too daunting, and capital expenditure to support production is also too high. But you can do it with a product that only needs to be replaced every 30 years, or after 50,000 hours of use, whichever comes first," said Otten.
