Philips Optical Storage (POS) is not a separately incorporated company but a business group of Royal Philips Electronics (now Koninklijke Philips N.V., NYSE: PHG), the Dutch multinational. Its development centers were in the Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, China and the U.S., with Eindhoven (Glaslaan 2) serving as a principal site. Philips is public and does not break out POS financials or headcount, so no revenue or employee figure specific to the unit is verifiable.
Operations. POS developed and supplied optical storage hardware: optical disc drives, drive mechanisms, loaders, and optical pick-up units (OPUs) for CD/DVD data, consumer and automotive applications, plus recordable/rewritable media such as DVD+R. Philips' data (PC) line was restructured in 2002–2003, moving to Taiwan and cutting ~390 Belgian positions. In 2003 Philips placed the data business into a joint venture with BenQ, Philips BenQ Digital Storage (PBDS) — Taipei-based, 51% Philips / 49% BenQ. In 2006 POS's OPU unit was transferred to Arima Devices, and its automotive playback module business went to Lite-On. After BenQ sold its 49% to Lite-On, PBDS was renamed Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions (PLDS), a Philips 51% / Lite-On 49% venture selling drives under Lite-On and HP brands.
Litigation posture. POS is an operating-company defendant, not an NPE: the tracked case data show 0 cases as plaintiff and 1 as defendant. It holds no plaintiff-side assertion record in our database.
The tracked case. Ricoh Company, Ltd. v. Quanta Computer Inc. et al. (W.D. Wis., filed 2006-08-24) involved optical-disc-drive patents (U.S. 6,631,109; 6,172,955; 5,063,552; 6,661,755). Quanta brought third-party indemnification claims against Philips Taiwan, Ltd., Business Line Data and Philips Optical Storage; the district court dismissed those as moot on summary judgment in 2007. The Federal Circuit (550 F.3d 1325, 2008) affirmed in part and vacated/remanded contributory- and induced-infringement issues as to Quanta; Ricoh did not appeal as to Philips. A 2009 jury awarded Ricoh $14.5M against Quanta, settled in 2011. The suit was filed in Wisconsin, not a plaintiff-friendly NPE venue.