SONY CORP.

Tobei

SONY Building-Japan,Tokyo,Ginza

The SONY CORPORATION

Sony Corporation (Sonī Kabushiki-gaisha) is a multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and one of the world's largest media conglomerates with revenue of $70.303 billion (as of 2007) based in Minato, Tokyo. Sony is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics, video, communications, video game consoles and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets, which developed the company into one of the world's richest companies.

Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group, which is engaged in business through its five operating segments - electronics, games, entertainment, financial services and other. These make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. Sony's principal business operations include Sony Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sony Ericsson and Sony Financial Holdings. As a semiconductor maker, Sony is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders. The company's slogan is Sony. Like no other.

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HITORY

In 1945, after World War II, Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in a bombed-out building in Tokyo. The next year, he was joined by his colleague Akio Morita and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., which translates in English to Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. The company built Japan's first tape recorder called the Type-G.

In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled in the United States and heard about Bell Labs' invention of the transistor.He convinced Bell to license the transistor technology to his Japanese company. While most American companies were researching the transistor for its military applications, Ibuka looked to apply it to communications.In August 1955, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering released the Sony TR-55, Japan's first commercially produced transistor radio.which featured an innovative slim design and sound quality capable of rivaling portable tube radios. It was for the TR-6 that Sony first contracted "Atchan", a cartoon character created by Fuyuhiko Okabe, to become its advertising character. Now known as "Sony Boy", the character first appeared in a cartoon ad holding a TR-6 to his ear, but went on to represent the company in ads for a variety of products well into the mid-sixties.[9] The following year, 1957, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering came out with the TR-63 model, then the smallest (112 × 71 × 32 mm) transistor radio in commercial production. It was a worldwide commercial success.

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ORIGIN OF THE NAME

When 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 company occasionally used the acronym "Totsuko" in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name. .

The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of the Latin word Sony or son(us) and also a little boy sonny, which is the root of sonic and sound as well as familiar word of everybody called a boy in February 1955, and company name changed to Sony in January 1958. 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 successfully sued a candy producer using the name, who claimed that "Sony" was an existing word in some language).

. 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. . Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval.