Company Name
Sony Corporation
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Founded
May 7, 1946
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Headquarters
1-7-1 Konan, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0075, Japan * Access & Map
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Representative Corporate Executive Officers * President and CEO
Kazuo Hirai * EVP and CFO
Masaru Kato
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Major Products * Televisions
LCD televisions * Digital imaging
Video cameras, digital still cameras, etc. * Audio / Video
Blu-ray Disc players/recorders, DVD players, home audio, car audio, etc. * PCs and other networked products
PCs, mobile audio, etc. * Semiconductors
Image sensors and other semiconductors * Electronic components
Batteries, audio/video/data recording media and data recording systems * Professional solutions
Broadcast and professional-use equipment * Medical
Medical-related equipment
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Locations of Major Offices and Research Centers (in Japan)
Tokyo, Kanagawa, Miyagi * Access & Map
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Headcount (Consolidated)
146,300 (as of March 31, 2013)
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Consolidated Sales and Operating revenue(2012)
6,800,900 million yen
I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Sony Corporation, which is founded by Akio Morita has been struggling in developing innovative and multimedia products for more than 60 years since it was established in 1946. Since it was established, Sony creates its vision and mission statement that they keep on producing products based on those statement and it somehow brings a competitive advantage to Sony Corporation itself. Multimedia products such as television, tablet, video cameras, and even PlayStation have successes its customers. They spread those products in some market segments based on the region. Japan is the country that has the biggest portion in one of those market segments.
Meanwhile, the use of the report will explain the purpose of this report has been created. For example, this report aims to know the background, the competitors, and how they are competing in the market share until
One of Sony’s greatest strengths is their ability to produce innovative, quality products. Sony’s web page states “Sony innovations have become part of mainstream culture, including: the first magnetic tape and tape recorder in 1950; the transistor radio in 1955; the world’s first all-transistor TV set in 1960; the world’s first color video cassette recorder in 1971; the Walkman personal stereo in 1979; the Compact Disc (CD) in 1982; the first 8mm camcorder in 1985; the Minidisk (MD) player in 1992; the PlayStation game system in 1995; Digital Mavica camera in 1997; Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) player in 1998; and the Network Walkman digital music player in 1999” (Sony.com/en/corporate).
PC World published The 20 Most Innovative Products for the Year 2006. Sony’s Reader was listed as number six and Sony’s PlayStation was listed as number sixteen. Sony Corporation has managed to be competitive and stay a powerful organization by learning from past failures. Sony states the following: “Sony has learnt much from previous unsuccessful products. The Sony MSX home computer, for example, did not attain a satisfactory level of success. But it did teach Sony development engineers valuable know-how that would be applied in later years. In effect, these engineers became living resources, representing latent power within Sony that did not exist in other AV companies” (Sony.net).
Another strength of Sony is their ability to be successful in several different markets. They have made an impact in the video game market, the PC market, and especially the television market and there are still