Morita Akio, (born Jan. 26, 1921, Nagoya, Japan—died Oct. 3, 1999, Tokyo), Japanese businessman who was cofounder, chief government officer (from 1971), and chairman of the board (from 1976 by way of 1994) of Sony Corporation, world-renowned producer of client electronics merchandise.
Morita got here from a household with a protracted custom of sake brewing and was anticipated to observe within the household enterprise. Instead he confirmed an early curiosity in expertise, ultimately attending Ōsaka Imperial University and graduating in 1944 with a level in physics. During World War II he was assigned to the Air Armoury at Yokosuka, the place he met Ibuka Masaru, trade’s consultant on the Wartime Research Committee. Together the 2 males labored to develop thermal steerage techniques and night-vision gadgets.
After the struggle Morita labored with Ibuka to determine a communications laboratory in Tokyo. In 1946 they cofounded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation (Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō), renamed Sony Corporation in 1958. Morita’s main considerations had been the monetary and enterprise issues; he was liable for advertising and marketing Sony merchandise worldwide. Some of Morita and Ibuka’s product successes embody early client variations of the tape recorder (1950; Ibuka had developed magnetic recording tape a 12 months earlier), the transistorized radio (1955), and the “pocket-sized” transistor radio (1957).
Morita had a company imaginative and prescient that was world in scope. Indeed, the title Sony was chosen after the founders searched dictionaries looking for a reputation that will be pronounceable in any language. (Sony was derived from the Latin sonus, “sound.”) In 1961, beneath Morita’s route, Sony turned the primary Japanese firm to promote its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. In addition, he moved himself and his household to the United States for a 12 months in 1963 as a way to higher perceive American enterprise practices and American methods of pondering. Once Sony merchandise started to promote properly internationally, Morita opened factories within the United States and Europe along with these in Japan.
With Ibuka’s modern client merchandise and Morita’s enterprise savvy, Sony turned a significant competitor within the electronics trade. Morita pioneered the idea of branding, ensuring that the title Sony was outstanding on all merchandise and refusing to promote merchandise to different companies to be packaged beneath their labels. The company additionally used American-style promoting to nice benefit. Frequently, nonetheless, Morita helped Sony to prosper by recognizing the potential in new merchandise. It was at Morita’s urging that the Sony Walkman transportable tape participant was developed and marketed (firm insiders doubted that there was sufficient client demand for the system). The Walkman was one in every of Sony’s hottest client merchandise within the Eighties and ’90s.
Not all choices made by Morita had been so profitable; the assumption and willpower he invested in successful merchandise had been generally invested in missteps as properly. For occasion, Sony was one of many first to launch videocassette recorders (VCRs) for residence use, however Sony’s model, Betamax (Beta), was quickly overwhelmed by the extra standard VHS model; it was a while earlier than Morita was prepared to permit Sony to shift to the trade commonplace of VHS. After the Beta drawback, nonetheless, Morita concluded that Sony should forge partnerships with different electronics companies. Thus, when Sony developed the CD storage disk that will ultimately revolutionize pc knowledge storage and the music trade, it was finished in partnership with the Dutch agency Philips Electronics NV to make sure that an trade commonplace for the product was achieved from the beginning.
As Sony’s stature grew, so did Morita’s within the worldwide enterprise group. He sat on a variety of boards representing Japanese enterprise. He was vice-chairman of the Keidanren (Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations), a bunch that has a robust affect over choices made by the Japanese authorities regarding enterprise and economics. Morita additionally was a longtime member of the “Wise Men” (because the eight-member Japan–U.S. Economic Relations Group is informally known as).
Morita was carefully concerned within the administration of the Sony firm till his retirement, owing to in poor health well being, in 1994. His autobiography, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony, was revealed in 1986.