SolveYourProblem Article Series: Sony Playstation, TV's & Other Products
What's So Cool About Sony?

How Sony Got Its Start

The Sony Corporation has become a global powerhouse in the electronics and entertainment industry and as a multinational corporation. A Japanese corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Sony is a global manufacturer of electronics, communication products, videos and video games, and information technology both for consumers and professionals. Sony is also among the world’s top 20 semiconductor sales leaders. The global powerhouse employs 158,500 people and has consolidated annual sales revenue of $67 billion for the fiscal year that ended in March 2005. Let’s find out how this media giant got its start.

Following World War II, Masaru Ibuka, nicknamed the “genius inventor,” turned a bomb-out building in Tokyo into a radio repair shop. The following year, Akio Morita joined him and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., which translates into Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. Their company invented Japan’s first tape recorder and called it the Type-G.

During a trip to the United States in the early 1950s, Masaru Ibuka learned about the inventor of the transistor by Bell Labs. Ibuka bought the license for the transistor technology for Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. Ibuka intended to apply the transistor technology to the field of communications rather than to the military applications for which his American counterparts were interested. Thus, in 1955, Ibuka invented the first commercially successful transistor radio.

Named the TR-55, the new transistor radio was small enough to be carried in a coat pocket. In 1956, Ibuka and his partner marketed about 40,000 of a larger although still portable transistor radio called the TR-72, which was exported to North America, the Netherlands, and Germany. The following year saw the introduction of the smallest model, the TR-63, which became an immediate worldwide success.

Now that the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation had got its start, the need for a more marketable name became apparent. From the Latin word Sonus, which is the root word of “sonic” and sound” and from the English word sunny, and from the Japanese slang of Sonny-boys, which translates as “whiz kids,” came the brand name “Sonny.” Too similar to the Japanese saying soh-nee, meaning “business goes bad,” Akio Morita invented the word “Sony”—one that the company could claim as its very own.

By 1958, Sony saw its demand for its portable transistor radios increase from about 100,000 units in 1955 to a mind-boggling 5 million. Carried by more and more American teenagers, the radios were timed perfectly with the popular introduction of rock and roll.

From transistor radios in the 1950s, Sony moved on to being one of the leaders in the development of televisions and portable recording devices in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, Sony innovated the videocassette, shortwave radio, and to great acclaim, the Walkman, among other products. The 1980s found Sony working on the compact disc, computer workstation, Discman, and computer diskettes. In the 1990s, Sony introduced such common household brands as the Playstation, soon to be branded the PS1, Aibo (Artificial Intelligence roBOt), an interative, robotic pet, and the Memory Stick, the flash memory card licensed to many other companies. This decade has Sony still working as a global powerhouse in the entertainment and electronics industry. Its latest Playstation, the PS3, with a rollout scheduled for November 2006, has people clogging Internet retailers for pre-orders at $499 a piece.

Anyone who has ever watched a good color television, used an SLR camera to take photos, or listened to music stored in their back pocket has Sony to thanks for leading the way in the invention of some of the world’s most popular entertainment tools. While Sony got its start in a bombed-out building, it has risen to a world powerhouse on whose shoulders many other technology giants have stood.

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SolveYourProblem.com : 2008

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