Gaston Bastiaens

Who is Gaston Bastiaens?

Gaston Bastiaens is a Belgian engineer and businessman. As a vice president of Philips Electronics, he was responsible for the Compact Disc as well as for CD-i, CD-ROM, Philips' contributions to the MPEG standard and the foundations for the DVD.

After graduating with distinction from the KU Leuven in Electrical and Nuclear Engineering, Bastiaens served in the military from 1971 to 1972. In 1972 he joined the Hi-Fi division of Philips Electronics in Leuven, where he served in various management capacities until 1982. During his earlier years there he created a number of new production methods, including for the assembly of loudspeaker systems, manufacturing of tuners and component insertion in printed circuit boards. By introducing new strategies including CAD/CAM, he was later able to reduce the development time of Hi-Fi components from 18 months to nine.

In 1983 Bastiaens was promoted to the Philips headquarters in Eindhoven where he became a general manager and director with worldwide responsibility for the Compact Disc project. Between 1983 and 1986 he oversaw a multi-divisional engineering effort the bring the cost of a compact disc player from 1150 Dutch guilders down to 220.