About Sony
Sony is a leading global audio-visual electronics and information technology company and a leading motion picture and television production company.
It is the second largest music company in the world. Sony is the co-developer of the CD, DVD and super AUDIO CD and the developer, manufacturer and marketer of Playstation game consoles.
Sony is a company with 1 035 consolidated subsidiaries worldwide.
~History (how it all started)~
Morita and Ibuka founded the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp. (the predecessor of Sony) in 1946 in a bombed out Tokyo department store building with an investment of less that $500. In the early years the company had 20 employees
The company began by producing components and kits that upgraded AM radios into short wave radios. Their first major product, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, was released in 1950. Other early products included electrically-heated seat cushions, electric megaphones and audio control consoles.
In 1951 the company had 159 employees and $439,500 in annual sales. In 1956 its had 483 employees and sales of $3.35 million.
In 1958, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp. abandoned its cumbersome name and adopted a new name, Sony, a playful combination of sonus , the Latin word for "sound," and "sunny boy," English slang for a young innovative man. The Sony name was used on transistor radios before it became the name of the company.
Early Sony Televisions and CDs
1960 TV In the 1960s Sony revolutionized television as it had done with radio. It developed the first transistorized television in 1959 (an expensive and unreliable device that didn't sell well) and the Triniton color TV system in 1968. Those products made televisions smaller and more affordable and changed the way people lived by moving televisions out of the living room into every room of the house.
Sony invested heavily in the Beta format for VCRs, which they introduced in 1975 but ultimately lost the rival VHS system backed by its main competitor Matsushita (Panasonic). Even so Sony helped bring video into people homes and Sony profited wonderfully from a revolution that allowed people to watch what they wanted when wanted to, without commercials if they so desired. It also brought pornography out of the red light districts into people's homes.
Sony also gave the world the camcorder in 1985. The Rodney King incident—the police beating captured on video during riots in Los Angeles in the early 1990s—is one example of what can happen when ordinary people are set lose with their own video cameras. Now look at the You Tube world.
Sony sold the world’s first CD in 1982. Five years later CDs overtook LP record sales in Japan. The specifications used in 1982 are still used today. Norio Ohga (1930-2011)—chairman of Sony from 1982 to 1995—is credited with developing the CD . Recruited after he complained about the quality of Sony recordings, he helped develop the technology and insisted on CDs being 12 centimeters in diameter and hold 75 minutes worth of music—enough to store all of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Once an aspiring opera singer himself, Ohga insisted in the 1970s that CDs would eventually replace vinyl records because of the superiority of digital sound. Early supporters of his work included Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock.
Sony Music
Sony Music is Japan’s largest record company. In the late 1980s Sony purchased Columbia Records Group for $2 billion. Like Columbia Pictures, its record was also spotty, and has included disputes with big stars like Bruce Springsteen, George Michael and Michael Jackson.
In 2002, Michael Jackson had a widely publicized legal battle with Sony. With Johnnie Cochran and the Rev. Al Sharpton acting as advisors, he called Sony music racist and called the head of Sony music the devil, drawing a picture of him with horns and a pitchfork, and blamed the company for not promoting his new album. The move was widely seen as an attempt by Jackson to win concessions from Sony, which co-owns Jackson’s valuable music catalogue, which includes his hit songs as well as many songs by the Beatles.
In 2004, Sony and BMG (Bertelsmann) merged to create the world’s second largest music company after Vivendi Universal Music.The new company was called Sony-BMG. The new company had $4.5 billion to $5 billion in annual sales and embraces artists like Aerosmith, Beyonce and Britney Spears.
In August 2008,Sony agreed to buy Bertelsmann’s entire 50 percent stake in Sony BMG music for $900 million and took full control in October 2008. The decision ended the four-year Sony-Bertelsmann music partnership that was characterized by the New York Times as “more dissonance than harmony.”
Share of U.S. music album sales: 1) Vivendi Universal Music (32 percent); 2) Sony and BMG (25 percent, with Sony 15 percent and BMG 10 percent); 3) Warner Brothers (21 percent); 4) EMI Music (9 percent); and Independents (14 percent).
Sony Artists include Jennifer Lopez, the Dixie Chicks, The Offspring. BMG artists include Avril Lavigne, OutKast, Usher, Foo Fighters, Elvis Presley, Miles Davis, Johnny Cash and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Playstation
PlayStation 2 PlayStation and its sequel Playstation2 were invented by a team led by Kutaragi. Sony's success was based in part on the wooing of independent games designers, who were tired of being manipulated by Nintendo. PlayStation sold well and games played on it sold well.
Sony PlayStation was launched in 1994. It was introduced to compete with Nintendo’s Super Famicon, which had debuted only weeks before. The irony os that Sony developed the game console after Nintendo pulled out of a joint venture.
In 1998 PlayStation1 earned Sony $5 billion and 40 percent of its profits. By 2000 in one in every four U.S. households had one. The 100 millionth PlayStation was shipped in May 2004. Of these about 70 million were PlayStation2s But by that time sales had slowed to a point that Sony’s net income was hurt.
Sony Success
From the beginning Sony was determined not to produce discount products but rather high-priced, high-quality items. The first transistor radio sold from $29.98 at a time when television didn't cost much more and new cars sold for less than $1,000.
One reason that Sony found success in America first and made such a mark in the global market is they were shut of Japanese markets by Matsushita, which dominate the domestic Japanese electronics market and its distributors.
Sony took off in the 1970s and 1980s with the sales of sleek, modern-looking televisions, Walkmans, compact disc players, VCRs and other popular electronic devices. Sony as much as another company helped erase the notion that Japan made inferior products.
Sony's research laboratories employed 1,000 engineers whose goal was to make products people didn't know they needed. Morita once said, "Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want." Among the things it came up was the CD which it invented with Phillips and launched in 1982.
In 1961, Sony had 3,703 employees and $51.6 million in sales. In 1966, it had 6,061 employees and $130.4 million in sales. In 1971, Sony had grown to 10,003 employees and $544.7 million in sales. By 1991, it was a global giant with 19,811 employees and $27.96 billion in sales. In 1999, Sony had worldwide sales of $57 billion and a profit of $1.2 billion.
