Roy Jakobs

Overview

Roy Jakobs
Born	1974 (age 51–52) Kerkrade, Netherlands
Citizenship	Dutch
Education	Master's degrees in business administration and marketing; executive board program
Alma mater	Radboud University Nijmegen; TIAS School for Business and Society; Nyenrode Business Universiteit
Occupation	Business executive
Employer	Royal Philips
Known for	Leading the turnaround of Royal Philips following the global Respironics device recall
Title	President and Chief Executive Officer of Royal Philips
Term	October 15, 2022 – present
Predecessor	Frans van Houten
Board member of	Philips Board of Management; American Heart Association CEO Roundtable
Spouse	Married
Children	3

🌐 Roy Jakobs (born 1974) is a Dutch business executive who has served as president and chief executive officer of Royal Philips since October 15, 2022, becoming one of the youngest leaders in the company’s modern history. Rising from a bicultural upbringing in the Dutch–German border region, he built a career through management roles at Royal Dutch Shell and Reed Elsevier before joining Philips in 2010 and holding senior positions in lighting, domestic appliances, personal health, and connected care. His tenure as CEO has been defined by managing the fallout from Philips’ global recall of Respironics sleep and respiratory-care devices, executing a three-year turnaround plan focused on safety, simplification, and productivity, and positioning the company as a focused health-technology group that integrates artificial intelligence across its product portfolio.

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Early life and education

🏠 Border-town childhood. Jakobs was born in 1974 in Kerkrade, a town in the southern Netherlands close to the German border, and grew up in a bicultural household with a German seismic engineer father and a Dutch nurse mother. The borderland setting, where Dutch and German languages and customs intersected, exposed him early to different perspectives and helped shape a habit of withholding judgment about others’ backgrounds and experiences.

😷 Health challenges and empathy. As a child Jakobs suffered from severe asthma and allergies, conditions that limited his activities and only eased in his late teenage years. Friends and family later recalled that this “bounded” youth, in which he had to manage breathlessness and restrictions, gave him early insight into what it means to live with chronic illness—an irony not lost on observers given his later responsibility for a company embroiled in a major respiratory-device safety crisis.

🌾 Family wartime stories. Jakobs’ worldview was strongly influenced by family accounts of World War II, including stories of his maternal grandparents hiding Jewish refugees on their farm while occupying forces were stationed there, and of his paternal grandmother giving birth to his father in an air-raid shelter during Allied bombings. Hearing accounts of hardship on both sides of the wartime divide taught him, in his own words, to avoid condemning others hastily and to recognize that people’s histories and struggles often remain unseen beneath the surface.

👵 Grandmothers as role models. Jakobs has often cited his two grandmothers as personal heroes, describing one as a farmer who largely ran a household and seven children on her own and the other as the manager of a family with a disabled husband who nevertheless pursued an emancipated lifestyle. From them he says he learned positivity, perseverance, humility, and a strong respect for others, concluding that it is possible to manage life even when events do not proceed as expected.

🎓 University studies. In 1992 Jakobs left Kerkrade to study business administration at Radboud University Nijmegen (then the Catholic University of Nijmegen), where he earned a master’s degree in business administration in 1997. During his studies he spent time at the Università degli Studi di Bologna in Italy, an experience that broadened his exposure to international academic and cultural environments.

📚 Further education and languages. After entering the workforce, Jakobs returned to formal education several times, obtaining a second master’s degree in marketing from the TIAS School for Business and Society and completing the New Board Program, an executive course at Nyenrode Business Universiteit in the Netherlands. By his mid-twenties he spoke at least five languages—Dutch, German, English, Italian, and Portuguese—which reinforced a cosmopolitan outlook and later helped him operate comfortably in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

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Career

🛢️ Early roles at Shell. Jakobs began his professional career in 1998 at Royal Dutch Shell, where he worked in the retail division for roughly seven years in a series of management positions. Within Shell he gained experience running operations at scale, managing complex distribution networks, and working in an international corporate structure that exposed him to performance-driven cultures and strict safety standards.

📚 Digital transformation at Reed Elsevier. In 2005 he left the energy sector for Reed Elsevier (now RELX), a large publishing and information group, where he joined as a managing director at a time when the industry was shifting rapidly from print to digital formats. Jakobs has been credited with leading a transformation of parts of the business from traditional print products to online services, strengthening his reputation as an executive capable of steering organizations through technology-driven change.

💡 Joining Philips and early leadership roles. Jakobs moved to Royal Philips in September 2010, initially as chief marketing officer of Philips Lighting in Eindhoven, as that division faced intense competition and a disruptive shift toward LED technology. In 2011 he was appointed market leader for Philips Middle East & Turkey, based in Dubai, where he oversaw activities across a heterogeneous region and later said the role deepened his understanding of entrepreneurship, diversity, and the importance of building bridges across cultural and political boundaries.

🏠 Domestic appliances and personal health. In 2015 Jakobs was asked to lead Philips’ Domestic Appliances business, a division experiencing leadership changes and strategic uncertainty, where he applied a hands-on, detail-oriented approach aimed at stabilizing operations and refreshing the product portfolio. When Philips decided to narrow its focus to health technology and ultimately divested the domestic appliances unit in 2021, Jakobs’ role shifted in October 2018 to chief business leader of Personal Health, a business responsible for consumer health products such as oral-care devices and air purifiers; under his leadership, Philips reported that these businesses were returned to growth after a period of underperformance.

🏥 Connected Care and the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally, Jakobs was appointed chief business leader of Connected Care, which includes critical care ventilators, patient monitors, and sleep and respiratory-care equipment. As hospitals faced surging demand for intensive-care capacity and remote monitoring, he oversaw efforts to ramp up production of ventilators and virtual ICU platforms, later describing the period as a trial by fire that required crisis leadership and rapid decision-making under pressure.

⚠️ Respironics recall and financial impact. In June 2021 Philips announced a global recall of millions of Respironics continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines, BiPAP devices, and ventilators after discovering that a sound-dampening foam used in the devices could degrade and release particles and volatile compounds into patients’ airways. Regulatory filings and safety reports indicated that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration associated the defective devices with hundreds of reported injuries and deaths, while Philips set aside substantial provisions for repair, replacement, and legal costs as its share price fell by around 70% between April 2021 and late 2022, erasing tens of billions of euros in market value.

📡 Portfolio moves amid crisis. While managing the operational aspects of the recall in 2021, Jakobs also led acquisitions of companies such as BioTelemetry, Capsule Technologies, and Cardiologs, which strengthened Philips’ capabilities in remote cardiac monitoring and clinical informatics and reflected a continued push toward data-driven healthcare solutions despite the surrounding controversy. These deals fit into Philips’ broader strategy of repositioning itself as a health-technology company focused on connected care, diagnostic imaging, and image-guided therapies after divesting legacy lighting and domestic-appliance businesses.

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Chief executive officer of Royal Philips

🧭 Appointment as CEO. In August 2022 Philips announced that long-serving CEO Frans van Houten would step down and that Jakobs would succeed him as president and chief executive officer, with effect from October 15, 2022. At 48, he became the youngest CEO in Philips’ modern history, and the supervisory board highlighted his detailed knowledge of the respiratory business and his role in managing the recall as reasons to entrust him with the turnaround of the company.

💼 Initial mandate and investor reactions. Jakobs’ appointment was met with a mix of cautious optimism and criticism from investors and commentators: some welcomed an internal candidate with deep operational experience and perceived decisiveness, while others questioned promoting an executive who had been part of the leadership structure during the period when the Respironics issues emerged. At an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting convened to approve his appointment, representatives of shareholder associations warned that he inherited what one called a “chafing legacy” rather than a comfortable dowry, and urged him to communicate more openly and avoid the pattern of positive forecasts followed by negative surprises that had damaged trust under his predecessor.

🛡️ Emphasis on safety and quality. Jakobs has said that from his first day in the top role he wanted to make it “crystal clear” that patient safety would be his highest priority, and one of his early decisions was to create a chief patient safety and quality officer position reporting directly to him to elevate quality oversight to the executive level. He also emphasized culture change by encouraging employees across Philips to speak up about quality issues, instituting regular forums where problems could be brought directly to top management, and asking staff to reflect on how their work affected patients and customers, measures intended both to prevent future crises and to signal a break with past practices.

📉 Restructuring and cost reductions. Confronted with declining profitability and large recall-related provisions, Jakobs launched a three-year plan covering 2023–2025 centered on simplifying Philips’ structure, improving operational excellence, and reducing costs. The plan included two rounds of workforce reductions totaling about 10,000 jobs—around 13% of the global workforce—designed, according to Jakobs, to remove management layers, focus on fewer priorities, and reduce bureaucracy while preserving investment in research and development. By late 2024 Philips reported that productivity and efficiency measures under the plan had generated more than €1.5 billion in savings, helping offset recall expenses and support margin recovery.

🤖 AI and health-technology strategy. Under Jakobs’ leadership Philips has doubled down on its strategic identity as a health-technology company, concentrating on diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, connected care, and personal health devices rather than consumer electronics or lighting. He has been particularly outspoken about the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare, saying that there is effectively no Philips product without an AI component and promoting AI-enabled imaging systems and monitoring platforms as tools that can reduce clinical workloads, speed up diagnosis, and improve patient outcomes in health systems facing chronic staff shortages. Jakobs co-chairs an AI in healthcare steering committee with the CEO of Mayo Clinic under the auspices of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, reflecting his involvement in efforts to set ethical and regulatory frameworks for AI use in clinical practice.

🏥 Focused portfolio and market exposure. During Jakobs’ tenure the company has reaffirmed its focus on healthcare after having already spun off its lighting activities as Signify and sold the domestic-appliances unit, with Philips’ revenue now largely derived from hospital diagnostic and treatment equipment, connected-care solutions such as monitors and respiratory devices, and consumer-oriented personal health products. Jakobs has argued that this narrower scope allows Philips to concentrate on addressing systemic challenges such as the growing mismatch between healthcare demand and available resources, while also acknowledging that focus increases the company’s exposure to cycles in healthcare capital spending and regional policy shifts.

📈 Financial performance and external investors. Philips recorded a net loss of more than €1.6 billion in 2022 as the recall provisions weighed heavily on results, but underlying businesses began to stabilize in 2023 and 2024, with improving margins and modest sales growth outside certain markets. The company’s share price, which had fallen to levels roughly three-quarters below its pre-recall peak by October 2022, nearly doubled from that low point during Jakobs’ first two years in office, although it remained well below earlier highs. In August 2023 Exor N.V., the investment company controlled by Italy’s Agnelli family, announced an investment of about $2.8 billion for a 15% stake in Philips, making it a major shareholder; Jakobs welcomed the move as a sign of confidence from a long-term investor known for backing industrial and healthcare businesses.

🌏 Exposure to China and ongoing headwinds. Despite these positive developments Jakobs has had to contend with external challenges, notably a sharp slowdown in orders from China following changes to hospital procurement policies and increased local competition, which prompted Philips to cut its sales outlook and triggered one of the steepest one-day share price drops in its recent history. He has argued that, excluding the Chinese market, Philips’ performance is broadly in line with the three-year plan and has reiterated goals for improved growth and profitability by 2025 through disciplined execution of the simplified operating model.

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Compensation and wealth

💶 CEO compensation structure. As chief executive of a large listed company, Jakobs receives a compensation package comprising a base salary, short-term incentives, long-term share-based awards, and pension contributions, with levels set by Philips’ supervisory board and subject to shareholder scrutiny. When he became CEO in 2022, his annual base salary was set at €1.2 million, slightly below that of his predecessor, reflecting a desire to align pay with the company’s challenged circumstances.

📊 Recent remuneration levels. According to Philips’ disclosures and regulatory filings, Jakobs’ total remuneration for 2023, his first full year as CEO, was approximately €4.58 million, and for 2024 about €4.25 million, including base pay, a variable cash incentive, and long-term equity awards. External analyses estimate that his 2024 pay translated to roughly US$4.4 million, a modest decrease from 2023 largely due to lower incentive payouts.

🚫 Bonus waivers and shareholder sentiment. In response to Philips’ poor performance and the scale of the recall crisis, Jakobs and fellow executives waived their 2022 bonuses, including an annual incentive he had accrued earlier that year as head of Connected Care, a gesture described as acknowledging the “sentiment and negative experience” of shareholders. The decision followed a 2022 shareholder vote in which a large majority opposed Philips’ prior remuneration report, signaling dissatisfaction with how pay had been aligned with results during the recall period.

📈 Equity stake and net worth. Unlike founder-owners of some companies, Jakobs’ wealth is primarily derived from his management career and accumulated equity awards rather than a substantial ownership stake; analyses of Philips’ share register estimate that he holds around 0.02% of the company’s shares, worth a few million euros at recent market prices, alongside performance-based share entitlements that vest over time. Public sources suggest that his total net worth is likely in the tens of millions of euros, reflecting more than two decades in senior roles at multinational corporations rather than entrepreneurial gains.

🏛️ Board roles and external activities. In addition to chairing Philips’ Board of Management and Executive Committee by virtue of his CEO role, Jakobs participates in sectoral and non-profit initiatives such as the American Heart Association’s CEO Roundtable, a group of corporate leaders focusing on employee health and well-being. He does not sit on the boards of other publicly listed companies, and his external engagements are broadly aligned with Philips’ healthcare mission and his interest in the intersection of technology, health policy, and workforce issues.

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Personal life and leadership style

👨‍👩‍👦 Family and privacy. Jakobs is married and has three children, reported in Dutch media as three sons, and is based in the Netherlands close to Philips’ headquarters in Amsterdam after earlier overseas postings in the Middle East and China. He tends to keep details of his family life out of the spotlight, and has said that personal milestones, such as his 50th birthday in 2024, are marked with relatively modest celebrations like a family dinner rather than high-profile corporate events.

🗣️ Communication and Dutch directness. Colleagues and journalists have described Jakobs as a relatively reserved but approachable leader who speaks in a measured, detailed way and raises his tone mainly when emphasizing urgency or determination. He embraces what he calls Dutch directness, arguing that straightforward communication about both successes and problems is essential, and has tried to differentiate his style from that of previous management by providing more candid updates to employees and investors after a period in which Philips issued a series of negative earnings surprises.

🌍 Cosmopolitan outlook and diversity. With a Dutch–German background and experience living and working in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, Jakobs often references the importance of understanding different cultures and avoiding superficial judgments, citing, for example, his repeated questioning at U.S. border controls due to an Iranian entry stamp as a reminder of how quickly people can be stereotyped. He has tied these experiences to a broad commitment to diversity and inclusion, saying that people perform best when they can be “free, authentic and diverse” and arguing that heterogeneous teams, like richer data sets in AI, lead to better decisions.

👩‍💼 Gender diversity in leadership. As CEO, Jakobs has publicly set goals for increasing the share of women in senior roles at Philips and has described the appointment of the company’s first female chief financial officer, Charlotte Hanneman, in 2024 as the result of a deliberate effort to broaden the leadership profile. He has said that during the search for a new CFO he faced temptation to revert to appointing yet another male candidate but chose to persist in finding a qualified woman, linking this to a conviction that diverse leadership improves the resilience and performance of the organization.

📚 Interests and demeanor. Public information about Jakobs’ personal interests remains limited, but interviews and profiles portray him as an avid reader of history and technology topics and someone who enjoys engaging in wide-ranging conversations—from family stories about his grandmothers to technical discussions of digital platforms. Social-media posts from Philips’ corporate channels have depicted him in informal settings, such as a “three questions, one coffee” video reflection, reinforcing an image of a relatively low-key, approachable CEO who favors open-collar attire over more formal styles.

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Controversies and challenges

🫁 Respironics device recall. The global recall of Respironics sleep and respiratory-care devices remains the most significant controversy associated with Philips during Jakobs’ leadership and has shaped perceptions of his tenure. Investigative reporting suggested that Philips had received complaints about foam degradation for years before the 2021 recall and alleged that senior executives, including Jakobs when he led personal health and later connected care, participated in discussions in the mid-2010s in which the scale and urgency of the issue were debated. Jakobs has maintained that decisions at the time were based on the information then available, while acknowledging with hindsight that the wrong judgment was made and committing to “stop at nothing” to improve safety and quality systems.

⚖️ Regulatory oversight and legal exposure. The recall prompted extensive regulatory scrutiny, particularly in the United States, where the Food and Drug Administration imposed a consent decree on Philips Respironics that restricts sales of most sleep-apnea and ventilator devices in the U.S. until manufacturing and quality systems meet agreed standards. Philips agreed to work under the supervision of an independent monitor and to implement extensive remediation plans, while also facing class-action and individual lawsuits from affected patients. In 2024 Philips reached a settlement of approximately $479 million with U.S. claimants without admitting liability, and Jakobs has said that the company’s internal testing has not demonstrated “appreciable harm” from the degraded foam, a conclusion that continues to be contested by some regulators and plaintiffs’ attorneys.

📣 Shareholder activism and governance. Philips’ handling of the recall and its financial impact sparked significant shareholder activism, including a 2023 vote in which investors refused to discharge the management and supervisory boards from liability for the 2022 financial year—an unusual rebuke in Dutch corporate practice that left open the possibility of legal claims. Earlier, at the meeting that approved Jakobs’ appointment as CEO, shareholder groups criticized the earlier leadership for opaque communication and pressed him to adopt a different approach, leading Philips to step up engagement with investors, adjust its remuneration policies, and strengthen board-level oversight of quality and regulatory matters through a dedicated committee.

👥 Layoffs and corporate identity. The workforce reductions announced under Jakobs’ three-year plan drew concern about morale, particularly in the Netherlands, where Philips has long been regarded as a flagship industrial employer, and were accompanied by commentary that the company had become significantly smaller and more vulnerable than in its conglomerate heyday. Critics argued that systematic divestments over decades had left Philips with fewer buffers against sector-specific shocks, while Jakobs countered that focus was necessary to remain competitive and that the restructuring would ultimately make Philips more agile and better able to serve healthcare customers.

🏛️ ESG positions and policy debates. Jakobs has generally avoided overtly political interventions but has been active in debates directly connected to Philips’ activities, including advocacy for value-based healthcare models, greater data sharing across health systems, and regulatory frameworks that enable the responsible adoption of AI in medicine, especially in Europe where he has cited concerns about innovation and scale-up. Commentators have noted that while Philips continues to pursue environmental targets such as carbon neutrality in operations and increased renewable-energy use—goals set before his tenure—Jakobs’ primary reputational test remains whether he can transparently manage social and governance dimensions of the recall and turnaround rather than environmental issues alone.

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Other activities and observations

🩺 From childhood asthma to health-technology leadership. Observers have remarked on the symmetry between Jakobs’ childhood experience of asthma and his later role leading a company embroiled in a scandal involving respiratory devices, suggesting that his familiarity with chronic breathing difficulties may provide an additional layer of empathy for affected patients, even as he navigates the legal and financial complexities of the recall. In public remarks he has linked his early health struggles and family stories about resilience to his belief that organizations must confront problems directly rather than deflect them.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Bridging generations and cultures. As one of Philips’ younger CEOs, Jakobs has said he feels able to connect with both older and younger generations in the company and has promoted the motto “You are you” to encourage employees from 129 nationalities to bring their authentic selves to work. He has argued that age diversity, like gender and cultural diversity, enriches decision-making, drawing analogies to the need for representative data in AI systems and emphasizing that narrow perspectives can lead to flawed conclusions in both technology and management contexts.

🤝 Relationship with long-term investors. The entry of Exor as a major shareholder has brought Philips into the orbit of one of Europe’s most prominent investment families, and Jakobs has worked closely with Exor’s leadership, including John Elkann, as part of Philips’ board and shareholder dialogue. Analysts have speculated that Exor’s involvement could influence Philips’ strategic options in the longer term, but Jakobs has publicly framed the partnership as providing patient capital and additional expertise while leaving operational responsibility with Philips’ management team.

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