Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility of Sony
CORPORATE HISTORY.
Akio Morita, Masaru Ibuka, and Tamon Maeda (Ibuka's father- in- law) started Tokyo telecommunications Engineering in 1946 with funding from Morita's father's sake business. The company produced the first Japanese tape recorder in 1950. Three years later, Morita paid Western Electric (US) $25,000 for transistor technology licenses, which sparked a consumer electronics revolution in Japan. His firm launched one of the first transistor radios in 1955, followed by the first Sony-trademarked product, a pocketsized radio, in 1957. The next year the company changed its name to Sony (from "sonus,"
Latin for "sound," and "sonny," meaning little man). It beat the competition to newly emerging markets for transistor TVs (1959) and solid-state videotape recorders (1961).
Sony launched the first home video recorder (1964) and solid-state condenser microphone (1965). Its 1968 introduction of the Trinitron color TV tube began another decade of explosive growth. Sony bet wrong on its Betamax VCR (1976), which lost to rival Matsushita's VHS as the industry standard. However, 1979 brought another success, the Walkman personal stereo.
Pressured by adverse currency rates and competition worldwide, Sony used its technology to diversify beyond consumer electronics and began to move production to other countries. In the 1980s, it introduced Japan's first 32-bit workstation and became a major producer of computer chips and floppy disk drives. The purchases of CBS Records in 1988 ($2 billion) and Columbia Pictures in 1989 ($4.9 billion deal, which included
TriStar Pictures) made Sony a major force in the rapidly growing entertainment industry.
The firm manufactured Apple's PowerBook, but its portable CD player, Data Discman, was only successful in Japan (1991). In the early 1990s, Sony joined Nintendo to create a
new kind of game console, combining Sony's CD-ROM drive with the graphic capabilities of a workstation. Although Nintendo pulled
Akio Morita, Masaru Ibuka, and Tamon Maeda (Ibuka's father- in- law) started Tokyo telecommunications Engineering in 1946 with funding from Morita's father's sake business. The company produced the first Japanese tape recorder in 1950. Three years later, Morita paid Western Electric (US) $25,000 for transistor technology licenses, which sparked a consumer electronics revolution in Japan. His firm launched one of the first transistor radios in 1955, followed by the first Sony-trademarked product, a pocketsized radio, in 1957. The next year the company changed its name to Sony (from "sonus,"
Latin for "sound," and "sonny," meaning little man). It beat the competition to newly emerging markets for transistor TVs (1959) and solid-state videotape recorders (1961).
Sony launched the first home video recorder (1964) and solid-state condenser microphone (1965). Its 1968 introduction of the Trinitron color TV tube began another decade of explosive growth. Sony bet wrong on its Betamax VCR (1976), which lost to rival Matsushita's VHS as the industry standard. However, 1979 brought another success, the Walkman personal stereo.
Pressured by adverse currency rates and competition worldwide, Sony used its technology to diversify beyond consumer electronics and began to move production to other countries. In the 1980s, it introduced Japan's first 32-bit workstation and became a major producer of computer chips and floppy disk drives. The purchases of CBS Records in 1988 ($2 billion) and Columbia Pictures in 1989 ($4.9 billion deal, which included
TriStar Pictures) made Sony a major force in the rapidly growing entertainment industry.
The firm manufactured Apple's PowerBook, but its portable CD player, Data Discman, was only successful in Japan (1991). In the early 1990s, Sony joined Nintendo to create a
new kind of game console, combining Sony's CD-ROM drive with the graphic capabilities of a workstation. Although Nintendo pulled