Akio Morita

In the mid-1950s the American firm Bulova offered Morita an order large enough to fund his company, on the condition that the radios be sold under the Bulova name. His own board cabled him to accept; he refused, and later called it the best business decision of his career.¹

Akio Morita was a co-founder and, later, the president and chairman of Sony Corporation, a Japanese consumer electronics and entertainment company that grew from a bombed-out Tokyo repair shop into the global maker of the transistor radio, the Trinitron television, the Walkman, and the compact disc player. Morita ran Sony's commercial and brand-building side alongside the engineer Masaru Ibuka, and he is widely credited with making the label "Made in Japan" a mark of quality rather than cheapness.

Background

Morita was born on January 26, 1921, in the Nagoya area of Aichi Prefecture, Japan, the fifteenth-generation heir to a sake, miso, and soy-sauce dynasty established in 1665. His father, Kyuzaemon Morita, groomed him from childhood to take over the family business and brought him into company meetings early. The household had unusual Western exposure for the era, including a Model T Ford and an imported Victrola. In high school his father bought him an electric phonograph, and Morita became fixated on how the sound was produced, dismantling and rebuilding it and nearly failing school. He later said that was when his interest in electronics began.¹ He studied physics at Osaka Imperial University, now Osaka University, from 1940 to 1944 under the applied physicist Tsunesaburo Asada. During the Second World War he joined the Japanese Navy to keep studying physics rather than be drafted into the army, and was assigned to the Aviation Technology Center at the Yokosuka naval base, working on thermal-guidance and night-vision devices. There he met Masaru Ibuka, an engineer thirteen years his senior. The two recognized their complementary strengths, Ibuka as the builder and Morita as the salesman, and discussed starting a company.

Getting started

After Japan's surrender in August 1945, Ibuka opened a radio-repair shop in the bombed-out Shirokiya department store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi district. Morita read about it in the Asahi Shinbun that October and went straight there. He convinced his father to let his younger brother inherit the family sake business instead, and his father sold land in Nagoya to provide 190,000 yen in startup capital. On May 7, 1946, the two men co-founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., with roughly twenty employees in the ruined Shirokiya building.¹ Ibuka was 38 and Morita was 25. Their first product, an electric rice cooker, failed commercially, and they pivoted to a tape recorder after Ibuka saw U.S. military machines. With no magnetic tape available, they made their own from mimeograph paper coated with ferric oxide melted in a skillet, building Japan's first magnetic tape recorder, the Type-G, in 1950 and selling twenty units to the Japanese Supreme Court for stenography.

What he built

In 1953 Morita personally negotiated a transistor patent license from Western Electric for 25,000 dollars, roughly a year's profit for the company.² In 1955 the company released the TR-55, Japan's first commercially produced transistor radio, stamped with the brand name "Sony" even before that was the company's name. The 1957 TR-63 followed, and at demonstrations Morita had employees wear shirts with slightly larger pockets so the radio would look pocket-sized.² In 1958 the company was renamed Sony, from the Latin sonus and the American slang sonny, a name chosen to be pronounceable worldwide. In 1960 he founded Sony Corporation of America to sell directly under Sony's own name. He became Sony's president in 1971 and chairman in 1976. Products released during his tenure included the Trinitron color television in 1968, the Betamax videocassette recorder in 1975, the Walkman in 1979, and the compact disc in 1982, co-developed with Philips, with Sony's CDP-101 the first commercial CD player. He also wrote the 1986 autobiography Made in Japan and, in 1991, The Japan That Can Say No with Shintaro Ishihara, a controversial call for Japanese economic assertiveness.

How he operates

Morita treated branding as a strategic doctrine, refusing to let Sony's products be sold under other companies' labels when most Japanese firms manufactured anonymously for American distributors. He said he wanted people to think of quality when they heard the name Sony. The clearest test came in the mid-1950s, when the American firm Bulova offered a large order on the condition that the radios be sold under the Bulova name. Sony's own board cabled Morita to accept, but he refused against their instructions, later calling it the best business decision of his career and reasoning that three centuries of sake branding had taught him the name, not any single product run, was the asset.¹ Morita believed the demonstration was part of the product itself, and he said he believed people work for satisfaction, reflecting Sony's early emphasis on engineer autonomy.

Where things stand

Morita suffered a stroke while playing tennis in 1993 and stepped down as Sony's chairman on November 25, 1994.³ He died of pneumonia in Tokyo on October 3, 1999, at the age of 78. Sony today is a multinational conglomerate spanning electronics, gaming through the PlayStation, music, film through Sony Pictures, and image sensors, headquartered in Tokyo. Morita is remembered as the figure who helped make Japanese manufacturing synonymous with quality and as an early architect of Japanese business diplomacy in the United States.

Key facts

• Bankrolled Sony's founding with 190,000 yen his father raised by selling family land, financing an electronics startup from an ancient sake dynasty.
• Built Japan's first magnetic recording tape from mimeograph paper and ferric oxide melted in a kitchen skillet, producing the Type-G recorder in 1950.
• Turned down a company-saving Bulova order rather than sell under another firm's name, against his own board's explicit instruction, and later called it his best business decision.
• Had employees wear shirts with oversized pockets at demonstrations so the 1957 TR-63 radio would look pocket-sized.
• Co-authored The Japan That Can Say No in 1991, a bestselling but diplomatically controversial call for Japanese economic assertiveness.
• Suffered a stroke playing tennis in 1993, stepped down as chairman in 1994, and died of pneumonia in 1999 at age 78.