Sony Group Corporation

Sony Group Corporation, commonly known as Sony and stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Konan, Minato, Tokyo, Japan. A major technology company, it is one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional electronics, the largest video game console company, and the largest publisher of video games. Through Sony Entertainment Inc, it is one of the largest music companies (the largest music publisher and the second largest record label) and the third largest film studio, making it one of the most extensive media companies. It is the largest technology and media conglomerate in Japan. It is also recognized as the richest Japanese company with net cash reserves of 2 trillion yen.

Sony, with its 55 percent share of the image sensor market, is the largest image sensor maker, the second largest camera maker, and one of the top semiconductor sellers. It is the world's largest player in the premium TV market for sets of at least 55 inches (140 centimeters) priced over $2,500, and is the second largest TV brand by market share and, as of 2020, the third largest TV manufacturer. in the world based on annual sales figures.

Sony Group Corporation is the holding company of the Sony Group, which includes Sony Corporation, Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Sony Entertainment (Sony Pictures, Sony Music), Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Financial Group, Sony Creative Products and others.

The company's slogan is “We are Sony.” Their previous slogans were The One and Only (1979–1982), It's a Sony (1981–2005), like.no.other (2005–2009), make.believe (2009–2013) and Be Moved (2013–2021) . ).

Sony has a weak connection with the corporate group Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG), the successor to Mitsui keiretsu. Sony is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (where it is a member of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX Core30 indexes) with an additional listing as American Depositary Receipts listed on the New York Stock Exchange (traded since 1970, making it the oldest Japanese company listed on the US exchange), and ranked 88th on the 2021 Fortune Global 500 list.

Story

Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo

Sony began its activities after World War II. In 1946, Masaru Ibuka opened an electronics store in Shirokiya, a department store building in the Nihonbashi area of ​​Tokyo. The company started with a capital of 190,000 yen and a total of eight employees. On May 7, 1946, Akio Morita joined Ibuka to found a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation). The company built Japan's first tape recorder, called Type-G. In 1958, the company changed its name to Sony.

Name "Sony"

When Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was looking for a romanized name to use for marketing, they seriously considered using their initials, TTK. The main reason they didn't do this is because the Tokyo Kyuko railway company was known as TTK. The company sometimes used the abbreviation "Totsuko" in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had difficulty pronouncing the name. Another early name that was tried out for a while was "Tokyo Teletech", until Akio Morita discovered that there was an American company already using Teletech as a brand name.

The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mixture of two words: one was the Latin word "sonus", which is the root of sonic and sonic, and the other was "sonny", a common slang term used in the 1950s. America to name a boy. In the 1950s in Japan, the word "sonny boy" was borrowed from the Japanese language and referred to the smart and presentable young people that Sony founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka considered themselves to be.

The first Sony-branded product, the TR-55 transistor radio, appeared in 1955, but the company name did not change to Sony until January 1958.

During the change, it was highly unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters to write its name instead of writing it in Kanji. This move did not go without resistance: TTK's main bank, Mitsui at the time, had strong feelings about the name. They insisted on a name like Sony Electronic Industries or Sony Teletech. However, Akio Morita was firm because he did not want the company name to be tied to any specific industry. In the end, Ibuka and the chairman of Mitsui Bank gave their consent.

Globalization

According to Schiffer, the Sony TR-63 radio "opened up the US market and marked the beginning of a new consumer microelectronics industry." By the mid-1950s, American teenagers began buying portable transistor radios in huge quantities, helping propel the nascent industry from approximately 100,000 units in 1955 to 5 million units by the end of 1968.

Sony co-founder Akio Morita founded Sony Corporation of America in 1960. In the process, he was struck by the mobility of employees between American companies, which was unheard of in Japan at the time. When he returned to Japan, he encouraged experienced middle-aged employees from other companies to reconsider their careers and consider working for Sony. In this way, the company filled many positions and inspired other Japanese companies to do the same. Moreover, Sony played an important role in the development of Japan as a powerful exporter in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. It also helped greatly improve Americans' perception of "made in Japan" products. Known for its quality products, Sony has been able to charge above-market prices for its consumer electronics and has resisted cutting prices.

In 1971, Masaru Ibuka handed over the presidency to his co-founder Akio Morita. Sony founded the life insurance company in 1979 as one of its many secondary businesses. During the global recession in the early 1980s, electronics sales fell and the company was forced to cut prices. Sony's profits fell sharply. "It's all over for Sony," concluded one analyst. "The company's best days are behind us."

Around the same time, Norio Oga assumed the presidency. He encouraged the development of the compact disc (CD) in the 1970s and 1980s and the PlayStation in the early 1990s. Oga then bought CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989, greatly expanding Sony's media presence. Oga succeeded Morita as chief executive officer in 1989.

Consistent with the vision of co-founder Akio Morita and his successors, the company has aggressively expanded into new business areas. This was motivated in part by a desire for "convergence" by linking films, music and digital electronics via the Internet. This expansion proved unprofitable and unprofitable, threatening Sony's ability to charge more for its products as well as its brand. In 2005, Howard Stringer succeeded Nobuyuki Eden as CEO, marking the first time a foreigner had led a major Japanese electronics company. Stringer has helped revitalize the company's struggling media business, boosting blockbusters such as "Spider-Man" while cutting 9,000 jobs. He hoped to sell the peripheral business and refocus the company on electronics. Moreover, he sought to increase collaboration between business units, which he called "silos" operating in isolation from each other. In an effort to provide a unified brand for its global operations, Sony introduced a slogan known as "make.believe" in 2009.

Despite some successes, the company faced ongoing difficulties in the mid-to-late 2000s. In 2012, Kazuo Hirai was named president and CEO, replacing Stringer. Soon after, Hirai outlined his company-wide initiative, called "One Sony", to revive Sony after years of financial losses and a bureaucratic management structure, which former CEO Stringer found difficult to implement, in part due to differences in business culture and native languages ​​between the two. Stringer and certain Japanese divisions and subsidiaries of Sony. Hirai outlined three main areas of Sony's electronics business, including imaging technology, gaming and mobile technologies, and a focus on reducing core losses from the television business.

In February 2014, Sony announced the sale of its Vaio PC division to a new corporation owned by investment fund Japan Industrial Partners and the transformation of its television division into its own corporation to make it more flexible to rebuild the division after past losses totaling 7.8 billion dollars. more than ten years. Later that month they announced that they would be closing 20 stores. In April, the company announced that it would sell 9.5 million shares of Square Enix (approximately 8.2% of the gaming company's total shares) in a deal valued at approximately $48 million. In May 2014, the company announced two joint ventures with Shanghai Oriental Pearl Group to manufacture and sell Sony PlayStation game consoles and related software in China.

In 2015, Sony acquired Toshiba's image sensor business.

In December 2016, several news outlets reported that Sony was considering restructuring its US operations by merging its television and film business, Sony Pictures Entertainment, with its gaming business, Sony Interactive Entertainment. According to reports, such a restructuring would bring Sony Pictures under Sony Interactive CEO Andrew House, although House would not take over the day-to-day operations of the film studio. According to one report, Sony was expected to make a final decision on whether to merge its TV, film and games businesses by the end of its fiscal year in March next year (2017).

In 2017, Sony sold its lithium-ion battery business to Murata Manufacturing.

In 2019, Sony merged its mobile, TV and camera businesses.

On April 1, 2020, Sony Electronics Corporation was created as an intermediate holding company that will own and control its electronics and IT solutions business.

On May 19, 2020, the company announced that it would be renamed Sony Group Corporation effective April 1, 2021. Subsequently, Sony Electronics Corporation will be renamed Sony Corporation. On the same day, the company announced that it would convert Sony Financial Holdings (currently Sony Financial Group), in which Sony already holds a 65.06% stake, into a wholly owned subsidiary through a takeover bid.

On April 1, 2021, Sony Corporation was renamed Sony Group Corporation. On the same day, Sony Mobile Communications Inc. absorbed Sony Electronics Corporation, Sony Imaging Products & Solutions Inc. and Sony Home Entertainment & Sound Products Inc. and changed its trading name to Sony Corporation.

Formats and technologies

Historically, Sony was known for creating its own standards for new recording and storage technologies rather than adopting those of other manufacturers and standards bodies, while its success in the early years owed to the smooth capitalization of the compact cassette standard introduced by Philips. with whom Sony has had a long-term technological relationship in various fields. Sony (either alone or with partners) introduced several of the most popular recording formats, including 3.5-inch floppy disks, compact discs, and Blu-ray discs.

Video recording

Sony introduced U-matic, the world's first video cassette format, in 1971, but the standard was unpopular for home use due to its high price. The company subsequently launched the Betamax format in 1975. Sony was involved in the VHS format war in the early 1980s when they marketed the Betamax system for VCRs against the VHS format developed by JVC. Eventually, VHS reached critical mass in the market and became the global standard for consumer video recorders.

Betamax is for all practical purposes a legacy format. Sony's professional-oriented component video format called Betacam, a derivative of Betamax, was in use until 2016, when Sony announced it would cease production of all remaining 1/2-inch VCRs and players, including the Digital Betacam format.

In 1985, Sony released its Handycam products and the Video8 format. Video8 and the subsequent Hi-Band Hi8 format became popular in the consumer camcorder market. In 1987, Sony released 4mm DAT or Digital Audio Tape as the new standard for digital audio cassette.

Visual display

Sony held the patent for its own Trinitron until 1996.

Sony introduced Triluminos Display, the company's patented color enhancement technology, in 2004, which was used in the world's first LED-backlit LCD TVs. It was also widely used in other Sony products, including computer monitors, laptops and smartphones. In 2013, Sony released a new line of TVs with an improved version of the technology, which included quantum dots in the backlight system. This was the first commercial use of quantum dots.

In 2012, the company introduced a prototype of an ultra-thin RGB LED display, which it called Crystal LED Display.

Audio recording

Sony used the compact cassette format in many of its tape recorders and players, including the Walkman, the world's first portable music player. Sony introduced the MiniDisc format in 1992 as an alternative to the Philips DCC or Digital Compact Cassette and as a successor to the Compact Cassette. Since the introduction of MiniDisc, Sony has tried to promote its own audio compression technologies under the ATRAC brand instead of the more widely used MP3. Until late 2004, Sony Network's Walkman line of digital portable music players did not natively support the MP3 standard.

In 2004, Sony expanded the MiniDisc format with the release of Hi-MD. Hi-MD allows you to play and record audio on the new 1GB Hi-MD discs in addition to playback and recording on regular MiniDiscs. In addition to storing audio on discs, Hi-MD allows you to store computer files such as documents, videos and photos.

Audio encoding

In 1993, Sony challenged the industry standard Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound format with the release of a new and improved proprietary digital movie audio format called SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound). This format used eight channels (7.1) of audio, rather than the six that Dolby Digital 5.1 used at the time. Ultimately, SDDS was largely supplanted by the film industry's preferred DTS (Digital Theater System) and Dolby Digital standards. SDDS was designed exclusively for use in movie theaters; Sony never intended to develop a home theater version of SDDS.

Sony and Philips jointly developed the Sony-Philips Digital Interface Format (S/PDIF) and high-quality SACD audio. The latter is stuck in a format war with DVD-Audio. However, none of them received serious support from the general public. Consumers preferred CDs due to the ubiquity of CD drives in consumer devices until the early 2000s when iPods and streaming services became available.

In 2015, Sony introduced LDAC, a proprietary audio coding technology that allows high-resolution audio streaming over Bluetooth connections at up to 990 kbps at 32-bit/96 kHz. Sony has also made it available as part of the Android open source project, starting with Android 8.0 "Oreo", allowing every OEM to freely integrate the standard into their own Android devices. However, the decoder library is proprietary, so licenses are required for receiving devices. On September 17, 2019, the Japan Audio Society (JAS) certified LDAC with its Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification. Currently, the only codecs with Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification are LDAC and LHDC, another competing standard.

Optical memory

Sony demonstrated the optical digital audio disc in 1977 and soon teamed up with Philips, another major contender in storage technology, to set a global standard. In 1983, the two companies jointly announced the compact disc (CD). In 1984, Sony released the Discman series, an extension of the Walkman brand to portable CD players. Sony began improving the performance and capacity of the new format. It released write-once (WO) optical disks and magneto-optical disks of approximately 125 MB in size for the specific use of archival data storage in 1986 and 1988, respectively.

In the early 1990s, two high-density optical storage standards were being developed: one was MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD), supported by Philips and Sony, and the other was Super Density Disc (SD), supported by Toshiba and many others. . Philips and Sony abandoned their MMCD format and agreed to Toshiba's SD format with only one modification. The single disc format was called DVD and was introduced in 1997.

Sony was one of the leading developers of the Blu-ray optical disc format, the latest standard for disc-based content delivery. The first Blu-ray players became commercially available in 2006. The format became the standard for HD media over its rival format, Toshiba's HD DVD, following a two-year high-definition optical disc format war.

Sony's laser communications products for small satellites are based on technologies developed for the company's optical disc products.

Disk storage

In 1983, Sony introduced 90 mm microfloppy disks, better known as 3.5-inch (89 mm) floppy disks, which it developed at a time when 4-inch floppy disks and many variations of them from different companies existed to replace floppy disks of that time. - running 5.25-inch floppy disks. Sony was a great success and the format became dominant. 3.5-inch floppy disks have gradually become obsolete as modern media formats have replaced them. Sony had more than 70 percent of the market when it decided to abandon the format in 2010.

Flash memory

In 1998, Sony launched the Memory Stick format, flash memory cards for use in Sony's line of digital cameras and portable music players. It has received little support outside of Sony's own products, with Secure Digital (SD) cards enjoying significantly more popularity. Sony has updated the Memory Stick format with the release of Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick Micro. The company also released USB flash drives under the Micro Vault brand.

Communication

Sony introduced FeliCa, a contactless IC card technology primarily used for contactless payments, as a result of its joint development and commercialization of Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology with Philips. The standard is mainly offered in two forms: either chips embedded in smartphones or plastic cards with embedded chips. Sony plans to introduce this technology to rail systems across Asia.

In 2019, Sony launched ELTRES, its own low-power wide area wireless network (LPWAN) standard.

Continued research and development

In 2021, WIPO's annual World Intellectual Property Index report ranked Sony ninth in the world for the number of patent applications published under the PCT system. In 2020, Sony published 1,793 patent applications. This position is higher than the previous ranking, when it was ranked 13th in 2019 with 1,566 applications.