Akio Morita (26 January 1921-3 October 1999) was a Japanese businessman and co-founder of Sony. Morita pioneered Sony's development of the Walkman and the world's first CD player, the acquisition of the CBS Records Group and Columbia Pictures Entertainment, and Japan's economic self sufficiency (co-authoring the book The Japan That Can Say No with Shintaro Ishihara).
Biography[]
Akio Morita was born in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan on 26 January 1921, and, rather than engage in his family's sake, miso, and soy sauce manufacturing business, he received a physics degree from Osaka Imperial University in 1944 and served as an Imperial Japanese Navy sub-lieutenant during World War II, during which he met Masaru Ibuka. In September 1945, the two partnered to form a radio repair shop in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, founding the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. In 1950, the company sold the first tape recorder in Japan, and the company also purchased the licensing for transistor technology from Bell Labs, making their company one of the first to apply transistor technology for non-military uses. In 1957, their company produced a pocket-sized transistor radio, and they renamed their company to the "Sony Corporation" in 1958, deriving it from the Latin word sonus, meaning "sound". Morita founded the Sony Corporation of America in 1960 and was inspired by America's mobility of employees between companies, soon recruiting the best and brightest middle-aged employees of other Japanese companies into Sony. Morita became President of Sony in 1971, and, in 1975, Sony released the Betamax home videocassette recorder, a year before VHS came out. After Ibuka retired in 1976, Morita became Chairman of the company, and he introduced the Walkman in 1979 and the world's first Compact Disc (CD) player in 1982. In 1984, Sony launched a portable disc product, the Discman. Morita later oversaw the purchase of CBS Records Group (including Columbia Records and Epic Records) and acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment (including Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures) in 1989. In 1989, Morita stood down as CEO in favor of Norio Ohga, and he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1994. Ohga succeeded him as chairman.