Philips is one of the world's largest and most influential companies in the production of electrical appliances. It was developed from an electric light bulb factory attached to a leather products processing factory in Ndowen at the end of the 19th century. Currently, Philips produces a wide range of household appliances (e.g. electric stoves), indoor and outdoor lighting equipment, medical equipment, office appliances, industrial electrical equipment, a variety of photographic equipment, stereo recording equipment, video recording equipment, automotive radios and cassette recorders, and so on. In order to carry out research on all types of products, Philips has more than 200 institutes working on a variety of topics, such as integrated circuits, liquid crystals, heat treatment, plastics engineering, and so on. At the same time, Philips also has a special product shape in Endovan, as well as packaging, advertising research and design of the central research institute, known as the "Industrial Design Center", or simply "shape design center". The most important function of the design center, is to design new products for the modeling and development of related aspects of standardization and serialization requirements, so the design center and the Philips marketing department, the development of the two departments have been maintaining extremely close contact.