History of Sony

Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation with it's headquarters in Tokyo. The company is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics products for the consumer and professional markets.

Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent of the Sony group. It is engaged in business through its six operating segments - Consumer Products and services groups (consumer electronics, game and network services) Professional, Device and Solutions group 9B2B products and services), Pictures, Music, Financial Services and Sony Ericsson. These segments make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world.

The founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka derived the name from the latin word 'sonus' meaning sad and the English slang word 'Sonny' since the considered themselves to be 'Sonny boys', a loan word into japanese whih in the early 1950s meant smart and presentable young men.

After the end of World War II, the co-founder of Sony; Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in Nihonbashi. The next year, Akio Morita joined him and together they founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Croporation.) who built Japan's first tape recorder called the Type-G. Ibuka travelled to the US in the early 1950s and heard about Bell Lab's invention of the transistor.

He convinced Bell to license the technology to his Japanese company. Ibuka and Morita wanted to apply the transistor to communications while the American companies wanted to instead use it for Military applications. And all though the American company Regency Electronics and Texas Instruments built the first Transistor radio, Ibuka's company made it commercially successful.