OTD: 7th May

On May 7, 1946, Masaru Ibuka founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha with about 20 employees and initial capital of ¥190,000. Ibuka was 38 years old. Akio Morita, then 25 years old, joined shortly, with Morita's family investing during the early period and being the largest shareholder in the company which would later be re-named Sony.

The consumer market in post-war Japan because the economy had been devastated by the war, so Morita looked to the West as a market for his products. Many Japanese companies enjoyed modest success by building cheap copies of products developed in the West, but Morita wanted to develop new and innovative products of his own.

He wanted to develop a tape recorder but, being unable to source ready-made magnetic tape, he had to make his own tape by grinding up magnets and sticking the powder to strips of paper to test the prototypes. They perfected Japan's first magnetic tape recorder in 1950, and after some aggressive marketing by Morita, it was a modest success.

In 1957, it produced a pocket-sized radio (the first to be fully transistorized), and in 1958, Morita and Ibuka decided to rename their company Sony (derived from "sonus" – Latin for "sound" – and Sonny-boys the most common American expression).

The 'pocket-sized' radio was, however, slightly too big to fit in a shirt pocket. Morita made his salespeople wear shirts with slightly larger pockets to give the radio a "pocket sized" appearance.

In 1960, it produced the first transistor television in the world. In 1973, Sony received an Emmy Award for its Trinitron television-set technology. In 1975, it released the first Betamax home video recorder, a year before VHS format came out. In 1979, the Walkman was introduced, making it one of the world's first portable music players. In 1984, Sony launched the Discman series which extended their Walkman brand to portable CD products.

In 1960, the Sony Corporation of America (SONAM, currently abbreviated as SCA) was established in the United States. In 1961, Sony Corporation was the first Japanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, in the form of American depositary receipts (ADRs), which are traded over-the-counter. Sony bought CBS Records Group which consisted of Columbia Records, Epic Records and other CBS labels in 1988 and Columbia Pictures Entertainment (Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures and others) in 1989.

On November 25, 1994, Morita stepped down as Sony chairman after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage while playing tennis. He was succeeded by Norio Ohga, who had joined the company in the 1950s after sending Morita a letter denouncing the poor quality of the company's tape recorders.

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