Sleepless man who co-founded Sony Corporation

By Kenneth Kwama

Masaru Ibuka, the man who co-founded world's biggest electronics manufacturer, Sony Corporation was so passionate about his work that at some point during his career, he tried to stick his eyelids with glue in order to stay awake to continue working.

The man who is regarded as the person who turned Japan’s electronics industry into what it is today co-founded a tiny recording company that grew into the giant Sony Corporation.

He led the Japanese change to make own innovative electronic products instead of simply copying what was being done in the West. He brought transistor technology to Japan, and Sony built the first Japanese transistor radio and the world’s first transistorised television set," states www.pbs.org.

According to the web, Ibuka was born in 1908 in Nikko City, Japan. He attended the School of Science and Engineering at Waseda University, where he earned the nickname ‘genius inventor.’

He graduated in 1933 and began working at a photochemical laboratory, which recorded and processed movie film.

In 1945, after World War II, Ibuka left to start a radio repair shop in a bombed-out building in Tokyo. The next year, his colleague Akio Morita, joined him and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, which translates in English to Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation.

The company built Japan’s first tape recorder called the Type-G.

The company was the forerunner to Sony Corporation and had about 20 employees and initial capital of •190,000. Then, Ibuka was 38 years old and Akio, 25. Akio’s family had invested in the firm during the early period and was the largest shareholder.

Three years after its formation, the company developed a magnetic recording tape and in 1950, sold the first tape recorder in Japan. In 1957, it produced a pocket-sized radio and the following year, the entrepreneurial duo decided to rename their company Sony — Japanese slang for "whiz kids".

Since then, the company has been on the run, constantly upstaging competitors and taking over huge chunks of the market in areas in which it has operations.

According to Forbes.com, it has become the kind of company that constantly launches many great products that engineers and designers for competing companies are getting "little rest at night."

"It has rocketed into electronics and entertainment consumers’ minds as the brand. Beginning right after the end of the war as it did, one of Sony’s founding purposes was ‘to reconstruct Japan and to elevate the nation’s culture.’ It’s no small wonder that, with such lofty original goals, Sony has become an iconoclastic global brand," reads the Forbes story.

According to Forbes.com, Japan was known mainly for "ludicrously arcane instruction manuals for their cheap electronics products before Akio stepped forth to purposely change that."

He conceived of many superior products, such as the VCR, described as one of the inventions that changed people’s lives. Akio was also among the first engineers to consider ergonomic design.

The Sony design of things, such as the remote control that fits contentedly into the palm of the hand, is an early example of this focus.

In the story, Forbes quotes Tim Munoz, a partner at San Francisco-based branding and strategy consulting firm Prophet saying thus: "Sony is consistently introducing products that delight people, capturing their imaginations. They don’t have to have a bunch of marketing people sit in a room crafting an image. The people in the lab are creating magic products."

"Sony’s products stop you in your tracks," says Munoz.

"The brand acquires an almost mystical quality. If a company can consistently create products such as this, which generate phenomena and Sony does, it can effectively position itself accordingly as ‘the best’ and eliminate competition. Or at least keep them awake at night."

In 1960, the company produced the first transistor television in the world. In 1979, the Walkman was introduced, making it the world’s first portable music player. In 1984 Sony launched the Discman series, which extended their Walkman brand to portable CD products.

Sony Corporation of America became the first Japanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1961. The company went on and bought Columbia Records and other CBS labels in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989.

In 1966, Akio wrote a book called Gakureki Muyo Ron (Never Mind School Records), in which he stresses that school records are not important in one’s success or ability to do business.

In 1986, Morita wrote an autobiography titled Made in Japan. He was famous for co-authoring the 1991 essay The Japan that Can Say No with politician Shintaro Ishihara, which criticised US business practices and encouraged Japanese to take a more independent role in business and foreign affairs.

On November 25, 1994, Akio announced his resignation as Sony chairman, after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage while playing tennis. His successor, Norio Ohga, was drafted into the company to take over from him after sending Akio a letter denouncing the "poor" quality of the company’s tape recorders.