Born into a wealthy Japanese family in 1921, Sony founder Akio Morita was groomed as heir to his father’s sake (rice wine) business, yet his destiny was to be very different — and more lucrative.
Underwhelmed by the rice wine industry, Morita pursued his love of physics at Osaka Imperial University. By the time he graduated in 1944, Japan was in the midst of the Pacific War. Morita joined the navy, where he worked on the Wartime Research Unit. There he met Masaru Ibuka, with whom he founded the electronics company Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. two years later, with an initial staff of only 20.
Morita made his company a memorable brand by renaming it more concisely, despite fierce opposition from traditionalist colleagues
By 1950 the company had developed the first tape recorder in Japan and in 1957 came up with a pocket-sized radio.
Morita decided the company should seek to associate its brand with consistently high product quality — a familiar concept today, but in contemporary Japan many companies produced goods under different brand names. Pentax made goods for Honeywell, for example, likewise Sanyo for Sears.
Morita also made his company a memorable brand by renaming it more concisely, despite fierce opposition from traditionalist colleagues. Thus, the two-syllable Sony was born in 1957.
Morita was keenly aware of the importance of global markets. Tiring of insular views, he moved to the US in 1960 — the same year that Sony produced the world’s first transistor television — and in 1970 Sony became the first Japanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Sony has been at the forefront of technological innovation ever since, pioneering the portable cassette player with its iconic Walkman and dominating the video game console market since the mid-1990s with its Playstation console.
But this is not a story of unbroken success. Sony’s video cassette format, Betamax, was eventually crushed by JVC’s VHS, while the MiniDisc format that initially seemed destined to succeed CDs was soon rendered obsolete by MP3 players, in particular the iPod.
Morita worked for Sony until suffering a stroke at 70, gaining numerous awards for his efforts to forge cultural bonds between Japan and the rest of the globe. He died in 1999, aged 78, at the close of a century of technological revolution to which he had contributed so much.
