Philips Electronics leader dies at 100

Frits Philips, the celebrated former head of Philips Electronics who helped lead the company's global expansion, died at the age of 100 on Monday.

Philips, who succumbed to pneumonia after a fall last week, served the company for 40 years until his retirement in 1971, according to an Associated Press report. During that time, he oversaw the company's expansion into the Americas and Asia and its foray into new technologies, including the audio cassette and integrated electronic circuits.

Philips, whose father and uncle founded the company, started out as an industrial engineer at one of its factories in The Netherlands. In addition to rising to top executive of the company, Philips was something of a social activist. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he was imprisoned for five months after a strike by the company's workers. His efforts to help hundreds of Jewish prisoners at a concentration camp where he was forced to work earned him a medal from Israeli Holocaust authority Yad Vashem, the AP reported.