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Sony

Sony Corporation (TYO: 6758 , NYSE: SNE) is a global Japanese consumer electronics and financial services corporation based in Tokyo, Japan. It is currently one of the world's largest producers of consumer electronics and is one of the largest corporations in the world.

In America, its best-known product is the Sony Walkman, a portable cassette player small enough to clip onto a belt. The term walkman nearly became generic due to the flood of imitators ("walkman-style" tape players). It is also well known for its PlayStation, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3 game consoles. Sony Corporation is traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange under number 6758 and on the NYSE as SNE through ADRs.

History

Shirokiya, which was one of Japan's oldest companies (founded 1662) operated department stores. Shortly after the original store was rebuilt in 1924, it featured a state-of-the-art research and development division that created rice cookers, tape recorders and electric cushions, all under the Shirokiya brand. However, as Shirokiya's fortunes waned, the head researchers, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita departed in 1946, taking all 20 employees with them. They then founded Sony on May 7, 1946 as the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering. Their first consumer product, in the late 1940s, was a rice boiler. As it grew into a major international corporation, Sony acquired other companies with longer histories, including Columbia Records (the oldest continuously produced brand name in recorded sound, dating back to 1888). Today Norio Ohga is Honorary Chairman, Howard Stringer is Chairman and CEO, and Ryoji Chubachi is President and Electronics CEO.

Brand change

When Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was looking for a romanized name to use to market themselves, they strongly considered using their initials, TTK. The primary reason they did not, is that the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was known as TKK.

The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of the Latin word sonus, which is the root of sonic and sound, the English word "sunny", and from the word Sonny-boys which is Japanese slang for "whiz kids". However "Sonny" seemed not to be appropriate since it sounds too much like the Japanese soh-nee which means "business goes bad", Akio Morita pushed for a word that does not exist in any language so that they could claim the word "Sony" as their own (which paid off when they sued a candy producer who also used the name who claimed that "Sony" was just an existing word in some language).

At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters instead of Chinese characters to spell its name. The move was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, Mitsui, had strong feelings about the name. They pushed for a name such as Sony Electronic Industries, or Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however, as he did not want the company name tied to any particular industry. Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval.

In August 1955, Sony produced its first coat-pocket sized transistor radio they registered as the TR-55 model. In 1956, Sony reportedly manufactured about 40,000 of its Model TR-72 box-like portable transistor radios and exported some of this model to North America, the Netherlands and Germany. That same year they made the TR-6, a coat pocket radio which was used by the company to create its "SONY boy" advertising character. The following year, 1957, Sony came out with the TR-63 model, the then smallest (112 x 71 x 32 mm) set in commercial production. and a great sales success worldwide. The TR-63 was a shirt pocket transistor radio that was exported all over the world.

On page 209 of the book The Portable Radio in American Life by University of Arizona professor Michael Brian Schiffer, Ph.D., he wrote: "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 began 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 1958. However, this huge growth in portable transistor radio sales, that saw Sony rise to be the dominant player in the consumer electronics field, was not because of the consumers who had bought the earlier generation of tube radio consoles, but was driven by a distinctly new American phenomenon at the time called Rock and Roll.