August 28, 2025
3 Moves Signify’s New CEO Could Pursue: A Manifesto
Author: Al Uszynski
A leadership change is underway. What strategies will define Signify's next chapter?
It started in late April, right after Eric Rondolat stepped down as CEO of Signify. I didn’t set out to write this article at the time; just started jotting down thoughts. Half-ideas. Gut reactions. Questions about Signify’s future strategy without clear answers. A few came to me during a flight to San Francisco. A couple surfaced at Caribou Coffee in Buckhead. One arrived during intermission at the Palace Theater.
Over the weeks that followed, the list grew. Fourteen ideas in all — most of them probably flawed in many ways. Which is fair. I’m not sitting in a corner office in Eindhoven. Or Bridgewater. Or Peachtree City. I’m just watching from the cheap seats as the world’s largest lighting company works through a high-stakes leadership transition.
Days from now, As Tempelman will officially take over as CEO of Signify. He’ll do so with the unanimous blessing of shareholders, a track record of tripling profits at European utility Eneco, and the task of steering the world’s largest lighting company through a period of global transition.
As Tempelman
Tempelman seems like a serious operator — the kind of leader who favors long-term outcomes over flashy rollouts. That’s good, because Signify doesn’t need reinvention. It needs repair.
The company’s 2024 global revenues declined 8.4% to €6.14 billion ($7.2 billion). It’s most recent quarter, was the lowest revenue quarter since its 2016 spinoff from Philips; €1.418 billion ($1.66 billion)
The U.S. — still its largest market — saw a smaller drop of 5.3% in 2024, bringing in €2.095 billion ($2.2 billion). But even that number raises eyebrows. It includes everything: Philips lamps, Advance drivers, Genlyte Solutions brands like Lightolier, Ledalite and Color Kinetics, Cooper Lighting (which was doing $1.7 billion in revenue at the time of its acquisition), horticultural lighting from Fluence, and more.
And yet, for all that, the company’s footprint in the U.S. feels… smaller than expected.
What follows isn’t a blueprint. I’m not even suggesting these are the paths Signify should or must take. Tempelman is stepping into a complex global business, and he’s certainly working from a more informed playbook. But some kind of change is inevitable. Strategy doesn’t stay static when sales are down, margins are tight, and the industry keeps shifting underfoot.
So I offer these three ideas not as predictions or prescriptions, but simply as possibilities — a few of the things I’ve been thinking about as Signify enters its next chapter.
1. Merge the Channels: Cooper + Genlyte = One Signify North America
Since acquiring Cooper Lighting in 2020, Signify has kept it strategically separate from Genlyte Solutions — not just in branding, but in operations and sales representation. The idea was to maintain distinct “go-to-market” strategies. Cooper had its agencies. Genlyte had its own, often anchored by multi-territory heavyweights like SESCO Lighting.
This made sense. Cooper’s lineup — including brands like HALO, Metalux, Corelite and McGraw-Edison — go to market differently than Genlyte’s, which includes Lightolier, Day-Brite, Ledalite, and Color Kinetics. Maintaining two channels minimized agent disruption and, in concept, expanded market penetration; essentially giving them two shots at every project bid.
But that theory is running up against market math. Cooper was generating $1.7 billion in annual revenue at the time of the 2020 acquisition. Add in Genlyte Solutions, Fluence, Philips lamps, and everything else… and the U.S. business only delivers $2.2 billion today.
The gains seemingly haven’t materialized.
Eventually, Signify will have to decide: do we really need two sales forces? Two separate agent networks? Two teams managing overlapping projects with different software stacks and marketing strategies?
The tension isn’t new. In the Genlyte Thomas era that started in 2009, CEO Larry Powers famously kept two pre-merger factions separate. The “red team” (Lightolier and friends) and the “blue team” (Day-Brite, Capri, Omega) operated autonomously until the overlap became too costly.
And we’ve seen this before. In 2002, Hubbell merged its legacy lighting division with Lighting Corporation of America — brands like Kim Lighting, Prescolite and Dual-Lite. Their strategy? Pit the existing Hubbell reps against the LCA reps in a "business plan bake-off" in each market. Winner takes the whole line. Loser gets a termination letter.
That approach wasn’t elegant. But it was decisive.
No one’s suggesting agent consolidation tomorrow. But ten years from now, twenty years from now, it’s hard to imagine Cooper and Genlyte still operating in silos. The only real question might be whether Signify wants to control the timing — or let the market do it for them.
2. Build the Frictionless Spec Journey (Before Someone Else Does)
If Signify wants to reclaim momentum in project business, it won’t do it through product rollouts alone. It’ll need to win the workflow.
For consulting engineers and small-to-midsize specifiers, the bottleneck is time. Scaling their business usually means adding staff, raising rates, or getting more work done with the same team. If a company could drastically simplify the spec process, it wouldn’t just sell products. It would sell time.
And time is the ultimate loyalty engine.
Imagine an AI lighting platform that lets a specifier upload building plans for, say, a 15,000-square-foot office. AI reviews the drawing, queries the user for relevant design criteria, preferences, and constraints, and recommends a full product mix — from 2x2’s to emergency wall packs to architectural linears. BIM files included. Fixture schedule mapped out. Bills of material ready.
Not for a stadium. Not for a complex hospital project. But for bread-and-butter commercial projects? Start with one market. The U.S., Germany, or the Netherlands. Build the rails, then scale. This is doable.
Could Signify be the first to build that system? Yes. And they have the vertical portfolio to pull it off. Distributors, too, would benefit. So would reps. The only ones who wouldn’t? Competitors still asking customers to dig through IES files, PDFs, and Revit family files.
It’s not just about the tech. It’s about creating a customer experience that feels inevitable — because it’s better, faster, and more aligned with how professionals actually work.
Start small. But start.
3. (Gulp…) Exit the Consumer Lamp Business
This one will not go ever well in Eindhoven.
For more than a hundred years, Philips has meant bulbs. More recently in 2009, it won the Department of Energy’s $10 million L Prize for advancing LED innovation. It also introduced Philips Hue — a truly novel product that made whole-house RGB smart lighting accessible to regular consumers without custom integrators.
And now? That same product category may eventually drag the company down. The economics have shifted. Selling $50 smart bulbs to middle-income homeowners isn’t easy when rival brands offer decent-enough, hub-free products for $9.
Let’s not pretend Signify hasn’t tried to pivot while scaling. They’ve done everything a roomful of Wharton MBAs would recommend:
- Launch a lower-priced brand (Wiz) to target budget buyers.
- Expand Hue beyond lamps into luminaires and accessories.
- Create app-based ecosystems that increase platform stickiness.
Some of it worked. 2025 has seen a respectable rebound in the Consumer business, with EBITA margins above 10%. But quarter-to-quarter rebounds don’t hide the bigger problems: global pricing pressure, inventory complexity, global SKU sprawl and the brutal reality of commoditization.
And it’s not just about smart lamps. It’s all consumer lamps.
Margins are low. Retail partners are demanding. And the operational demands — packaging, distribution, support, returns — look nothing like the company’s B2B core.
It may be time to consider a more dramatic move.
- One option: carve out Hue and Wiz entirely. Find a buyer that wants to go head-to-head with GE and LEDVANCE and Xiaomi in the connected home space.
- Another: exit the consumer lamp business altogether — smart and dumb alike — and double down on what Signify still does best: commercial lighting, controls, and infrastructure.
There’s risk either way. But keeping one foot in a slow-margin legacy business while trying to drive growth elsewhere might be the riskiest choice of all.
Tempelman doesn’t have to do any of this right away. Or any of this at all. But he will likely be exploring all paths to a strategic turnaround.
He has four years under contract. A mandate from the board. And a company that’s no longer quite what it was — but not yet what it needs to be.
Sometimes, the best time to make hard decisions is before the market makes them for you.
