SONY IN GENERAL

Sony Corporation (ī ニ ー 株式会社, Sonī kabushiki gaisha ?, TYO: 6758, NYSE: SNE), is a Japanese multinational corporation based in the Minato District, Tokyo, Japan. She is active in various fields such as electronics, telephony, computer science, video games, music, cinema and audiovisual in general.

Sony Corporate includes more than one hundred companies around the world, including Sony France SA, Sony Corporation of America, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Interactive Entertainment and is present in 183 countries (see Sony Corporation companies).

History

Origin

The Sony City, headquarter of Sony in Tokyo.

The company was founded on May 7, 1946 under the name of Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō (東京 通信 工業?, TTK) 3 by Masaru Ibuka, engineer, and Akio Morita, physicist, hiring about twenty people in a company that repaired electronic equipment and who was trying to create his own products.

The name Sony appears on the products as early as 1955 but the company changed its name only in January 1958. It comes from the Latin sonus meaning son, and the English expression then in vogue in Japan Sunny boy who designates a young person to free and innovative spirit.

In 1954 the company began to develop really: at this date, the company obtains a license for the manufacture of transistors, basic electronic component par excellence. Thus, the first Japanese transistors leave the factories of Sony that year, 6 years after their invention in the United States. The following year, Sony markets the first radio receiver entirely based on transistors4.

Major innovations introduced by Sony include the color video cassette in 1971, the Betamax VCR in 1975, the Walkman in 1979, the 3.5-inch floppy disk in 1984, an electronic camera in 1981 Sony Mavica, the Compact Disk in association with Philips in 1982, the first consumer camcorder in 1983, the 8mm video in 1988, the first digital camera in 1985, or the Blu-ray disc in 2006.

In terms of content, in 1987 Sony bought CBS, which became Sony Music Entertainment in 1991, and in 1989 Columbia Pictures via Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Sony is an international company. Akio Morita felt from the start that his company had to consider the whole world as a market and not be limited to Japan.

Sony Corporation in the 2000s

In 2004, sales for all Sony Corporation companies and subsidiaries worldwide totaled nearly 69 billion euros. Sony's share of the global consumer electronics market was estimated at more than 14% in 2004 (ahead of Panasonic, Hitachi and Philips). In April 2004, Sony and Samsung set up an LCD panel manufacturing joint venture in Korea called S-LCD5.

On March 7, 2005, the English-born American Howard Stringer is named president of Sony Corporation after the resignation of Nobuyuki Idei6,7. The head office is in Tokyo, Japan. The company has 158,500 employees worldwide as at March 31, 2006.

In May 2008, Sony announced a record net profit of nearly 2.4 billion euros following a year 2007 marked by the great performances of its flagship products (CyberShot, Bravia, PlayStation, etc.) but also the sale of Nagasaki production lines from Cell and RSX processors to Toshiba and the sale of the Sony Center in Berlin8. On December 9, 2008, Sony Corporation announces a wave of layoffs affecting 8,000 employees by the year 2010, as well as a 30% reduction in research and development investments to deal with the economic crisis and falling sales especially in the area of   LCD9 screens.