Akio Morita
...er, was visiting the US at the time looking for new product ideas. He took up a transistor licence for Tokyo Telecommunications, a company he, his father-in-law and Akio Morita had formed to handle their growing tape recorder business. Morita came from a well-to-do old sake-making family. He put up the money and marketing energy, Ibuka the technical know-how. At their Tokyo factory, Ibuka cut the fault rate in transistor production from 95% to 2% and its cost from $6 US to 2 cents. The company launched one of the first transistor radios in 1995 and its first Sony product, a pocket-sized radio, in1957. It changed its name to Sony in 1958 and beat the competition into transistor TVs and solid-state videotape recorders in the next three years. In 1960, Morita, confident, articulate, outgoing, moved to New York to oversee expansion in the US. The Sony brand name had been a stroke of marketing genius to math William Lever’s Sunlight soap. Sony’s production innovation was hard to beat. Home video recorders and the Trinitron colour TV tube continued the growth momentum. Walkman was another great success but the Betamax VCR was beaten by Matsushita VHS technology. Japanese manufacturers who were coming under rising pressur...