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Unit 12 Famous companies
The story of Sony
When Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded their company in 1946, nobody had ever heard the
expression ‘Made in Japan’. Today, their company is a global leader in electronics.
In 1946, the Japanese capital, Tokyo, lay in ruins after the war. In the city, there was water and
electricity, but people were very poor and many didn’t have proper homes. Two young men lived
here. Their names were Masaru Ibuka, an engineer, and Akio Morita, a physicist. They had met
and had worked together during the war. Now they met again and decided to found a company
together. They planned to repair all the electrical equipment – radios and so on – which people
had and which was often broken. They called their company Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, the ‘Tokyo
Telecommunications Engineering’ company. They couldn’t afford to open a workshop, so they
used a room over a department store. The company employed seven people. Parts were also very
difficult to get, and often they bought things on the black market.
Despite all the problems, the company grew. Masaru and Akio managed to find a building for a
proper workshop. The two men also loved inventing things, and Masaru had lots of good ideas.
One was a cheap electrical rice pot. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very successful because it often
burned the rice!
Then, in the early 1950s, he travelled to the USA. There, the Bell telephone laboratory had just
invented the transistor. Masaru immediately saw that with transistors he could make small,
portable radios. In August 1955, the company started selling its first radios. People wanted to buy
them all over the world and the company became famous. But its name was a problem, and in
1957 Masaru and Akio decided to change it to Sony.
Many other famous products followed, including the Walkman in 1979, and the first PlayStation
in 1995. Today, Sony is one of the biggest and most successful electronics firms in the world. Mr
Ibuka died in 1997 and Mr Morita in 1999.
Gateway, page 124
© Ernst Klett Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart 2006 | www.klett.de
Von dieser Druckvorlage ist die Vervielfältigung für den eigenen Unterrichtsgebrauch
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Gateway
ISBN-10: 3-12-809250-8
ISBN-13: 978-3-12-809250-8
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