Sony
More info
- Founded
- Founders
- Masaru Ibuka, Akio Morita
- Headquarters
- Tokyo, Japan
- Website
- sony.com
From a transistor radio in a bombed-out Tokyo building to the image sensor in your phone — with the Walkman, the CD and the PlayStation in between.
Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded the company in 1946 as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo and renamed it Sony in 1958, built from the Latin sonus and the American "sonny". The breakthrough came with licensed transistor technology and the pocket radio, followed by the Trinitron picture tube, the Walkman in 1979 and the compact disc developed with Philips and launched in 1982.
Format wars have been both strength and weakness: Betamax lost to VHS and MiniDisc became a footnote, but CD and Blu-ray won. After the PlayStation in 1994 games became one of the group's heaviest divisions, and in parallel its semiconductor arm has become the world leader in the image sensors found in most mobile cameras.