Panasonic

Konosuke Matsushita was 23 when he opened a workshop in Osaka in 1918 selling an improved lamp socket and a two-way plug that let households run a lamp and an iron from the same outlet. The company was called Matsushita Electric for ninety years; "National" was the brand in Japan, and "Panasonic" (pan + sonic) appeared in 1955 on export loudspeakers. Only in 2008 did the group adopt Panasonic as its corporate name.

Matsushita owned half of JVC and threw its weight behind VHS in the format war against Sony's Betamax from 1976 onwards; Sony had the better picture, Matsushita had more factories and longer tapes. Later came the 3DO console (1993), the ruggedised Toughbook laptops (1996) and plasma TVs, which the company abandoned in 2014 once LCD and OLED had won. Since 2014 Panasonic has built the lithium-ion cells at Tesla's Gigafactory in Nevada, turning a century-old appliance maker into one of the world's largest battery manufacturers.