In September 1945, after the end of World War II, Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in the bomb-damaged Shirokiya department store building in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo. The next year, he was joined by his wartime research colleague, Akio Morita, and on 7 May 1946, they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K.[1] (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation). The company produced Japan's first tape recorder, called the Type-G.[1]
Sony Osaki West Technology Center (formerly Osaki Plant) in Ōsaki, Shinagawa, Tokyo was the major R&D and manufacturing facility for its Trinitron television sets, closed in 2007 (pictured in 2005)
In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled to the United States, looking for a market for the company's tape recorder, and heard about Bell Labs' invention of the transistor.[1] He convinced Bell to license the transistor technology to his Japanese company. Bell Labs agreed to do so while recommending Ibuka to produce Hearing aids using the transistor, then a popular application for the technology, suggesting that it would be difficult to apply the technology to radio. While most Japanese companies were researching the transistor for its military applications, Ibuka and Morita looked to apply it to communications.
Although the American companies Regency Electronics and Texas Instruments built the first transistor radio as joint venture in 1954, it would be the Ibuka's company that made them commercially successful for the first time.[2]
As an innovator
In August 1955, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo released the Sony TR-55, Japan's first commercially produced transistor radio.[3] They followed up in December of the same year by releasing the TR-72, a product that won favor both within Japan and in export markets, including Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. Featuring six transistors, push-pull output and greatly improved sound quality, the TR-72 continued to be a popular seller into the early sixties.
In May 1956, the company released the TR-6, which featured an innovative slim design and sound quality capable of rivaling portable tube radios. The following year, 1957, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo came out with the TR-63 model, then the smallest (112 × 71 × 32mm) transistor radio in commercial production. It was a worldwide commercial success.[1] The company marketed the radio as "pocketable", a Japanese-style English word the company came up with to highlight its portability and pocket-size. The word soon featured in English dictionary.[4]
University of Arizona professor Michael Brian Schiffer, PhD, says, "Sony was not first, but its transistor radio was the most successful. The TR-63 of 1957 cracked open the U.S. market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics." By the mid-1950s, American teens had begun buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, helping to propel the fledgling industry from an estimated 100,000 units in 1955 to 5,000,000 units by the end of 1968. As a result of the popularity of transistor radios, which empowered privacy and individualism, the way people listen to radio or music has changed forever. Sony also launched the world's first integrated circuit radio, the ICR-100 in 1967.
Following the first success in American consumer market, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo changed its name to Sony in 1958 as people outside Japan struggled to pronounce the original name. Sony established Sony Corporation of America, the company's first subsidiary in America, in 1960. And in the same year, Sony made another innovation by releasing the world's first non-projection type all-transistor and portable television, Sony TV8-301.
In 1961, Sony launched the world's first compact transistor VTR, the PV-100. In 1968, Sony launched the legendary color television set, Trinitron. The Trinitron was the reason that Sony had been the world's largest TV manufacturer in terms of annual revenue until 2006.[5][6]
In 1969, Sony launched Sony TC-50, a compact cassette recorder. NASA equipped every astronaut with the device from Apollo 7 onwards. Astronauts were required to use the recorder to log their missions but they also listened to music by inserting and playing the pre-recorded tapes. Masaru Ibuka also enjoyed listening to classical music using recorders, preluding the birth of Walkman. In October the same year, Sony released a prototype of the world's first commercial videocassette recorder. This led to the official launch of the VP-1100 two years later.
Sony received the Emmy in 1973 for developing the Trinitron. This was the first Emmy awarded to an electronics. In 1975, Sony launched the Betamax, which took part and lost in the video format war.
Walkman, the first stereo cassette player, was launched in 1979. The year 1981 is considered as a starting point of the Digital Revolution with Sony launching the world's first Compact Disc player, the Sony CDP-101, with a Compact Disc (CD) itself, a new data storage format Sony and Philips co-developed.[7] In that year, a 3.5-inch floppy disk structure was introduced by Sony and it soon became the defacto standard.
Sony is also the company that produced the first color video camera using a CCD, the XC-1. The Sony Mavica, released in 1981, is a prototype of the world's first commercial electronic still camera.
Sony played a significant role in the tech industry in the second half of the 20th century alongside Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Steve Jobs, fascinated by the company's innovative products, culture and work environment, was a big fan of Sony and regarded the company being in a league of their own, apart from the other comparable competitors.[8]
In 1991, Sony released the first commercial lithium-ion battery jointly with Asahi Kasei and had been the leader in the rechargeable battery industry until a massive defective battery scandal occurred in 2006.
Sony introduced Memory Stick, a flash memory storage format, in 1998, a year earlier than the announcement of SD card. The Sony's format is considered as a yet another failed standard from the company. The list of Sony's unsuccessful attempts to make their proprietary formats universally adopted includes Betamax, MiniDisc or the well-known abbreviated term, the MD, and Universal Media Disc.
Sony played a major role in the development of Japan as a powerful exporter during the late 20th century.[9] From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, it aggressively expanded into a variety of businesses, from film (Sony Pictures Entertainment) and insurance (Sony Life) to banking (Sony Bank) to internet service providing (So-net) and gaming (Sony Interactive Entertainment).[9] It also beefed up the music business it had operated in Japan, CBS/Sony Record, and turned it into Sony Music Entertainment, a multinational music label group. Part of its motivation for expansion was the pursuit of "convergence," linking film, music, and digital electronics via the Internet.[9] However this strategy ultimately failed, merely damaging Sony's balance sheet and making the company's business structure highly complex.[9]
Crisis and challenges
Howard Stringer, the first non-Japanese CEO of Sony, helped to reinvigorate the company's struggling media businesses, encouraging blockbusters such as Spider-Man while cutting 9,000 jobs.[9] Despite modest success, the company faced continued struggles from the mid 2000s and started to lose the leading position in the tech industry.[9] It became known for its stagnancy, with a fading brand name.[9]
Akio Morita was a Japanese entrepreneur and co-founder of Sony along with Masaru Ibuka.
Sony Group Corporation, formerly known as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. and Sony Corporation (ソニー株式会社), is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group comprises entities such as Sony Corporation, Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Sony Entertainment, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Financial Group, and others.
Walkman, stylised as WALKMAN (ウォークマン), is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman started out as a portable cassette player and the brand was later extended to serve most of Sony's portable audio devices; since 2011 it consists exclusively of digital flash memory players. The current flagship product as of 2022 is the WM1ZM2 player.
The Compact Cassette, also commonly called a cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips and released in August 1963, Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either containing content as a prerecorded cassette (Musicassette), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by the user. Although other tape cassette formats have also existed—for example the Microcassette—the generic term cassette tape is normally used to refer to the Compact Cassette because of its ubiquity.
JVC was a Japanese brand owned by JVCKenwood. Founded in 1927 as the Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan and later as Victor Company of Japan, Ltd., the company was best known for introducing Japan's first televisions and for developing the Video Home System (VHS) video recorder.
A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audiobooks. CD players may be part of home stereo systems, car audio systems, personal computers, or portable CD players such as CD boomboxes. Most CD players produce an output signal via a headphone jack or RCA jacks. To use a CD player in a home stereo system, the user connects an RCA cable from the RCA jacks to a hi-fi and loudspeakers for listening to music. To listen to music using a CD player with a headphone output jack, the user plugs headphones or earphones into the headphone jack.
A transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver that uses transistor-based circuitry. Following the invention of the transistor in 1947—which revolutionized the field of consumer electronics by introducing small but powerful, convenient hand-held devices—the Regency TR-1 was released in 1954 becoming the first commercial transistor radio. The mass-market success of the smaller and cheaper Sony TR-63, released in 1957, led to the transistor radio becoming the most popular electronic communication device of the 1960s and 1970s. Transistor radios are still commonly used as car radios. Billions of transistor radios are estimated to have been sold worldwide between the 1950s and 2012.
Aiwa is a Japanese consumer electronics brand of Aiwa Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of Towada Audio holdings. The current company was established in 2017 and creates mainly audio products; the brand is also licensed to or owned by other companies in different regions of the world, producing various electronics.
Hi-MD is a magneto-optical disc-based data storage format. It was a further development of the MiniDisc. With its release in later 2004, came the ability to use newly developed, high-capacity 1 gigabyte Hi-MD discs, in the same dimensions as MiniDisc. The last recorder and player was discontinued in 2011. Blank discs stopped production in September 2012.
Norio Ohga, otherwise spelled Norio Oga, was the former president and chairman of Sony Corporation, credited with spurring the development of the compact disc as a commercially viable audio format.
Kenwood is a Japanese brand of consumer electronics. It has been owned by JVCKenwood since October 2011, when Kenwood Corporation merged with JVC. Kenwood manufactures audio equipment such as AM/FM stereo receivers, cassette tape decks/recorders, amateur radio (ham) equipment, radios, cellular phones, speakers, and other consumer electronics.
Discman was Sony's brand name for portable CD players. The first Discman, the Sony D-50 or D-5, was launched in 1984. The brand name changed to CD Walkman, initially for Japanese lineups launched between October 1997 and March 1998, and then entirely in 2000. Discman and CD Walkman players are no longer produced.
The TR-55, released in 1955, was both Japan's and Sony's first commercially available transistor radio. The use of transistors allowed the device to be much smaller than earlier vacuum tube radios.
A handheld television is a portable device for watching television that usually uses a TFT LCD or OLED and CRT color display. Many of these devices resemble handheld transistor radios.
Philips Consumer Lifestyle is a subsidiary of the Dutch multinational electronics company Philips which produces consumer electronics and small appliances. It is the only Philips company headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The Americas division is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut.
Nobutoshi Kihara was an engineer at Sony, best known for his work on the original Walkman cassette-tape player in the 1970s and was commonly called Mr. Walkman in the press.
Sony Canada is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation, of Tokyo, Japan. Sony provides products that include Blu-ray players, BRAVIA televisions, Cyl digital cameras, Handycam Camcorders, VAIO computers, broadcast cameras, IPELA security cameras and video conferencing and many more products. Sony is an entertainment company that includes electronics, music, movies, games and online businesses. Sony Canada is headquartered in Toronto.
A videocassette recorder (VCR) or video recorder is an electromechanical device that records analog audio and analog video from broadcast television or other AV sources and can play back the recording after rewinding. The use of a VCR to record a television program to play back at a more convenient time is commonly referred to as time shifting. VCRs can also play back prerecorded tapes, which were widely available for purchase and rental starting in the 80s and 90s, most popularly in the VHS videocassette format. Blank tapes were sold to make recordings.
Koyo Electronics and its subsidiary Koyo Electronics Industry, often collectively referred to as just Koyo, are Japanese electronics companies based in Kodaira, Tokyo that manufactured radios from 1955 until 1973, and now its subsidiary manufactures industrial electronics devices and factory automation control systems.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Christian, Caryl, and With Hideko Takayama and Kay Itoi in Tokyo, George Wehrfritz in Hong Kong, John Sparks and Michael Hastings, in New York. "Sony is Not Japan; the Appointment of a Foreign CEO is a Sign of how Far the Iconic Company has Fallen in the Japanese Corporate Elite." Newsweek 21 March 2005: 30-. ProQuest Research Library. Web. 26 May 2012.
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