Royal Philips is teaming up with the US federal government to increase production of ventilators at Philips US manufacturing sites.
According to the company, Philips will invest tens of millions of dollars in its US manufacturing sites in order to double ventilator production by May 2020 and surge to a four-fold increase by Q3 for US and global markets.
In the first three months of this year, Philips has delivered several thousand ventilators to US hospitals. As a result of its production ramp up, Philips was able to deliver an additional batch of ventilators to one of New York’s hospitals, to help provide immediate relief to the surge of COVID-19 patients within the city.
“We are actively collaborating with the U.S. government to help save lives in the U.S. and across the globe,” said Frans van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips. “There is an unprecedented global demand for medical equipment to help diagnose and treat patients with COVID-19. We welcome the support of the US government in our efforts to aggressively increase the production of hospital ventilators. We believe in fair allocation of scarce medical equipment to those who need it the most, and we are ramping up to deliver 43,000 units to the most critical regions in the US in the coming weeks and months through December 2020.”
According to a company statement, Philips believes that critical medical equipment, such as hospital ventilators, should be made available across the world using a fair and ethical approach to allocate supply to acute patient demands based on data such as the COVID-19 statistics per country/region and the available critical care capacity. Philips may divide orders into batches to be delivered in phases, so that the company can simultaneously serve multiple countries/regions in need.
