172 Business View Magazine - October 2016
Westinghouse – the staff, the factories, all aspects of
it – and, rather quickly, cut over their whole line and
branded it completely as Philips.”
Meanwhile, Westinghouse Electric, which had evolved
into the CBS company in 1995, and changed its name
to the CBS Corporation in 1997, still owned the West-
inghouse “brand” and surmised that it might have
some value as a licensed brand name. Says Angelo,
“We were on their short list, being the largest non-
branded lighting company. The only brands the con-
sumer knew were G.E., Sylvania, and Philips. We had
assumed that Philips had purchased the rights to the
IP (Intellectual Property), and it turned out, they didn’t.”
Angelo says that the lighting industry is tremendously
competitive. “Dozens of small to mid-size companies
compete aggressively and hundreds of import com-
panies are always trying to get into the U.S. market,”
he states. “So, we were intrigued when the brand be-
came available because we saw that, as a privately-
held, trade name company, we were going to be in a
slow-growth mode because the giants were making it
more difficult for us. So, we were the first major com-
