Sony Corporation essays

Sony Corporation essays The Sony Company was incorporated in 1946 as Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. Its founders were Masaru Ibuka, whose Japan Precision Instruments Company had supplied electronic devices during World War II, and Akio Morita, an applied sciences instructor. The venture, which was funded by Morita's father, was formed to apply the advanced technology developed during the war to the manufacturer of consumer products. They renamed the company Sony (from the Latin sonus, sound) in 1958 and became one of the world's largest electronics corporations. Akio Morita came from a family with a long tradition of sake brewing and was expected to follow in the family business. Instead he showed an early interest in technology, eventually attending Osaka Imperial University and graduating in 1944 with a degree in physics. While serving in the navy during World War II he met Masaru Ibuka, industry's representative on the Wartime Research Committee. Ibuka was an imaginative engineer, a perfectionist who helped to create some of Sony's most popular products. Under his technical leadership, Sony introduced the first transistor television set in 1959, the first solid-state videotape recorder in 1961, and the Trinitron TV, launched in 1967. Toward the end of the war, Ibuka began a new business, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. He was a pioneer in applying leading electronics technology to a broad range of consumer products. He also originated a new direction in the Japanese electronics industry from modifying existing technologies to creating new business opportunities. Ibuka and Morita along with seven employees and $375 in capital started work in an abandoned department store amid the devastation of early 1946. The company's first innovation, an electric rice cooker, failed, but the pair persevered. Even Sony's failures are successes: Sony's Beta videotape format fell out of favor with the consumer market, but the ...