Sony

Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo — Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation — in the bombed-out Shirokiya department store in Tokyo in May 1946, with ¥190,000 in capital and 20 employees. Japan had surrendered nine months earlier. The founders' original product was a rice cooker that failed to cook rice properly. Ibuka later said the failed rice cooker taught them that innovation required multiple attempts.

Sony — as the company was renamed in 1958 — launched Japan's first transistor radio in 1955. Morita personally took the product to the United States to sell it to Bulova, who offered to buy 100,000 units but required them to carry the Bulova name. Morita refused, insisting the Sony name appear on every product. Bulova's representative reportedly told him: "Our company name is a 50-year-old name. Who has ever heard of Sony?" Morita refused anyway. It was the right decision.

Sony launched the Walkman in July 1979 — a portable cassette player that allowed people to listen to music privately while moving through the world. Sony's own market research suggested it would fail. Ibuka overruled the research because he wanted one for himself. The Walkman sold 50,000 units in its first two months. Over 400 million Walkmans were eventually sold. The concept of personalised portable entertainment that the Walkman introduced is the direct ancestor of the iPod, the smartphone, and streaming audio.

Sony launched the PlayStation in Japan in December 1994 — a console that had originally been developed as a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo, in collaboration with Nintendo, before Nintendo cancelled the partnership. Sony turned their cancelled Nintendo project into an industry-defining product. Within two years, PlayStation had outsold Nintendo 64. The PlayStation brand would eventually become the most profitable division Sony had ever built.

PlayStation 5 reached 93.7 million cumulative hardware units shipped by March 2026, making it the most profitable PlayStation generation in history — generating over $136 billion in total sales and $13 billion in operating income across its lifecycle. PlayStation Network had 132 million monthly active users at its December 2025 peak. Sony's Game & Network Services division generated $29.8 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, with record operating income of $2.9 billion. Sony Group as a whole posted record revenue and operating income in FY2025, with gaming, music, and imaging all hitting profit highs simultaneously. The company that had started in a bombed-out department store with a rice cooker that didn't cook rice had become one of the most diversified entertainment and technology companies on earth.