Sony Corporation is a Japanese multinational company based in the Minato district of Tokyo (Japan). It is active in various fields such as electronics, telephony, computers, video games, music, cinema and audiovisual in general.
Sony Corporate comprises more than 100 companies worldwide, including Sony France SA, Sony Corporation of America, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Interactive Entertainment and is present in 183 countries (see Sony Corporation companies).
The group announced on May 19, 2020 to rename itself for the date of 1ᵉʳ April 2021 in the course of a complete restructuring, while the electronics division will keep the name “Sony”.
Sony origin
The company was founded on May 7, 1946 as Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō by Masaru Ibuka, an engineer, and Akio Morita, a physicist, hiring about 20 people from a company that was repairing electronic equipment and trying to create its own products.
The name Sony appeared on products as early as 1955, but the company only changed its name in January 1958. It comes from the Latin sonus, meaning sound, and from the English expression Sunny boy, which was then in vogue in Japan, meaning a young person with a free and innovative spirit.
In 1954, the company began to develop in earnest: at that time, it obtained a license to manufacture transistors, the basic electronic component par excellence. Thus, the first Japanese transistors came out of Sony’s factories that year, 6 years after their invention in the United States. The following year, Sony marketed the first radio receiver entirely based on transistors.
Among the important innovations brought by Sony, let’s mention the color video cassette in 1971, the Betamax video recorder in 1975, the Walkman in 1979, the 3.5 inch floppy disk in 1984, an electronic camera in 1981 Sony Mavica, the compact disk in association with Philips in 1982, the first consumer camcorder in 1983, the 8 mm video in 1988, the first digital camera in 1985, or the Blu-ray disk in 2006.
In terms of content, in 1987 Sony bought CBS, which became Sony Music Entertainment in 1991, and in 1989 Columbia Pictures via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Sony is an international company. Akio Morita felt from the beginning that his company should consider the whole world as a market and not limit itself to Japan. He insisted that the name Sony should be clearly displayed on all the company’s products.