Sony Corporation

▪ Japanese corporation

Japanese  Sony Kk 

      major Japanese manufacturer of consumer electronics products.

      The company was incorporated by Ibuka Masaru and Morita Akio in 1946 as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (“Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation”). Ibuka, whose Japan Precision Instruments Company had supplied electronic devices during World War II, and Morita, an applied sciences instructor, had met during World War II as engineers designing heat-seeking missiles for the Imperial Japanese Army. Ibuka and Morita worked together for the next 40 years in what has been called one of “business history's most productive and intriguing relationships.” Ibuka's genius with product development and Morita's mastery of business management and marketing turned Sony into one of the most renowned brand names on the globe. Sony, which became the official name for the company in January 1958, was derived from the Latin sonus (“sound”) and was conceived to be an international and not a Japanese term.

      The company's first consumer product was an electric rice cooker. Although this product sold poorly, Totsuko, as the firm's name was abbreviated, did have a successful business repairing radios and other electrical equipment. Its repair work for the Japanese radio broadcaster NHK had to be approved by the U.S. Army of Occupation, which later gave the young company repair jobs of its own.

      In 1950 Totsuko introduced the first Japanese-designed tape recorder. Although this consumer item also sold poorly, the company's fortunes were about to take a dramatic turn. In 1952 Ibuka visited the United States and made the initial contacts for licensing the transistor from Bell Laboratories, then a division of Western Electric Company (Western Electric Company Inc.), the manufacturing arm of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T Corporation) (AT&T). The next year Morita went to the United States and signed the deal with Western Electric.

      This watershed agreement led to Totsuko's first hugely successful product line: transistor radios. Although Texas Instruments Incorporated was first to market with its Regency transistor radio in 1955, it was Sony's TR-63, an inexpensive shirt-pocket-sized all-transistor radio, that caught consumers' attention when it was released in 1957. Sony's pocket radios were a tremendous success and brought international recognition of the company's brand name.

      By 1960 business in the United States prompted the creation of Sony Corporation of America, with headquarters in New York City. When the company opened its store in 1962 on Fifth Avenue, it unfurled the first Japanese flag to be flown in the United States since the beginning of World War II.

      At the 1964 New York World's Fair, Sony introduced the MD-5, the first all-transistor desktop calculator. In 1968 the company shipped its first Trinitron colour television. By 1971, 40 percent of Japanese households had colour television sets, so Sony introduced the first colour video (video tape recorder) cassette recorder (videocassette recorder) (VCR), which led to its introduction of the Betamax VCR in 1975. The Betamax, though widely considered the best VCR technology ever developed, was more expensive than its competitor, the VHS (Video Home System). As more and more studios and video stores turned to VHS, Betamax lost market share, and Sony finally introduced its own VHS in 1988.

      In 1979 the Sony Walkman portable tape player hit the streets. Although Sony's engineers were skeptical about designing a device that could only play and not record, Morita insisted on developing the product, saying he would resign if the Walkman was not a success. The Walkman was an international sensation and eventually sold hundreds of millions of units. The first compact disc (CD) player emerged in 1982 from a development agreement between Sony and Dutch manufacturer Philips Electronics NV. Sony provided pulse-code modulation technology and combined it with Philips's laser system. The failure of Betamax had taught Sony a lesson; the format standard for CDs (and later digital videodiscs [DVDs]) was agreed upon by a wide range of companies in Japan, Europe, and North America. The next year Sony introduced the first camcorder.

      By the late 1980s, Sony executives, especially the company president and the chairman of Sony Corporation of America, Norio Ohga, wanted to add entertainment content to Sony's operations. In 1988 it bought CBS Records Group from CBS Inc. (now CBS Corporation), thus acquiring the world's largest record company, and the next year it purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. The Columbia acquisition, the largest to that time of an American company by a Japanese firm, ignited a controversy in the United States. The controversy was fanned by Morita's contribution to "The Japan That Can Say No," an essay written with Japanese nationalist Shintaro Ishihara in 1989. They claimed that Japan no longer depended on the United States and was a stronger, better nation than its postwar ally.

 The early 1990s were difficult years for Sony. The Japanese economy entered a decade-long recession, and both Ibuka and Morita suffered strokes (in 1992 and 1993, respectively). Morita officially retired in 1994 and died in 1999. With its founders no longer at the controls, Sony declared its first loss, more than $200 million, in 1993. Despite the business turmoil, Sony continued to design and deliver new products. In 1994 its entertainment division introduced its PlayStation video game console to the Japanese market. By 2002 the game unit was contributing more than 10 percent of the company's yearly revenues. Another major profit centre was Sony Online Entertainment, particularly its Internet virtual reality game EverQuest. The company's entertainment group also captured the imagination of many people with its robot dog, AIBO, introduced in 1999. In 1997 Sony introduced the VAIO line of personal computers. The VAIO was a high-quality and expensive system that the company marketed to users interested in developing or playing multimedia programs.

      In 2005, following further disappointing annual financial reports, Howard Stringer was elevated from chairman and chief executive officer of the Sony Corporation of America to chairman and chief executive officer of the Sony Corporation. Although the appointment of a non-Japanese to head the parent company surprised many, some two-thirds of Sony's employees worldwide are non-Japanese.

Mark Hall

Additional Reading

Morita Akio, Edwin M. Reingold, and Mitsuko Shimomura (Shimomura Mitsuko), Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (1986, reissued 1994), part autobiography, part business history, and part management primer, gives clear insight into Sony at the peak of its influence, when “Japan Inc.” was a feared economic rival of the United States and Western Europe. In John Nathan, Sony: The Private Life (1999, reissued 2001), numerous current and past executives and employees open up to the author on details of Sony's business and product development decisions.Mark Hall

* * *