Akio Morita

Japanese inventor and businessman

• Born: January 26, 1921
• Birthplace: Nagoya, Japan
• Died: October 3, 1999
• Place of death: Tokyo, Japan

Together with his mentor and business partner, Masaru Ibuka, Morita turned a tiny precision-instrument factory into the Sony Corporation, one of the largest industrial firms in the world and home of one of the best-known brand names in the world of business.

Early Life

Akio Morita (ahk-ee-oh moh-ree-tah) was born into a prominent family in Nagoya, the fifteenth-generation heir to one of Japan’s oldest sake-brewing families. He grew up in an affluent household that mixed native traditions with an easy familiarity with Western ways. While the family was devoutly Buddhist, holding religious services at home, the young Morita could play tennis on the family court, go for Sunday outings in an open Model T Ford, and listen to Western classical music on an imported Victrola. In his autobiography, Morita writes that as a youngster he was intrigued by electrical devices such as the vacuum tube, which could take old scratchy, hissing records and turn them into beautiful sounding music.

Before long the intrigue turned into an obsession, and he was making his own crude radio and electric phonograph as well as a primitive voice-recording device. His scientific tinkering may have been responsible for his somewhat spotty academic record: While he excelled at mathematics and science, he received less than average grades in other studies. Still, by dint of a determined effort during a year of intense study with tutors, he managed to gain admission to the prestigious Eighth Higher School. With a mixture of self-mockery and pride, he relates that he became the lowest-ranking graduate of his middle school ever to be admitted to the science department at the Eighth Higher School.

Morita continued to develop his scientific skills, from 1940 to 1944, as a disciple of Tsunesaburo Asada, a distinguished specialist in applied physics at Osaka Imperial University. On graduation in 1944, Morita entered the Japanese navy as a technician-lieutenant and engaged in research on heat-seeking devices in the one year that remained in the Pacific War. It was during that period that he met a brilliant electronics engineer, Masaru Ibuka, thirteen years his senior.

Ibuka, though working on the same military project, was a civilian and owned his own precision-instrument company. Those who know both men frequently comment on their differing personalities. Ibuka is invariably described as shy, retiring, and more typically Japanese, while Morita is a dynamic super-salesman, bold and outspoken. Nevertheless, the two were to become the closest of friends, colleagues, partners, and cofounders of the Sony Corporation.

Life’s Work

The story of Sony begins when Morita and Ibuka set up a shop repairing radios and making vacuum-tube voltmeters on the seventh floor of the charred, gutted ruins of a department store in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district in the grim days immediately after the end of the war. With a total capitalization of five hundred dollars a loan from Morita’s father the business was formally incorporated as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (Tokyo TelecommunicationsEngineering Company) in May, 1946. The world-famous name “Sony” would come later.

There were false starts in the early years experiments with manufacturing an electric rice cooker proved a failure, for example. In the meantime, when it became necessary to vacate their Ginza premises in 1947, they moved to the Gotenyama district on the southern edge of Tokyo, an area still devastated from the wartime bombing but once renowned for its cherry blossoms. The headquarters of the Sony Corporation is in Minato, a Tokyo “ward,” or municipality.

The first major breakthrough product that Morita and Ibuka produced was a tape recorder, manufactured for the domestic market in 1950. When sales for the machine proved disappointing, it was Morita who decided to bypass the powerful trading companies, which customarily acted as middlemen, and instead set up the company’s own distribution system. Morita himself personally visited Japanese schools to show how the product, then virtually unknown in Japan, could be used as a teaching tool, and before long nearly a third of Japan’s elementary schools had purchased the devices. More important, the gamble to ignore traditional marketing practices had paid off and from then on it was the company’s policy to manage its own sales, a factor that business analysts regard as crucial to Sony’s later success.

The next milestone in the company’s history has turned into one of the enduring legends of Japanese business history. In 1952, Ibuka (as president of the company) went to the United States to explore the possibilities of obtaining a patent owned by the Western Electric Company (WEC). When prospects for a deal seemed worth pursuing, the task was delegated to Morita, the more business-savvy vice president, who traveled to the United States for the first time in 1953. The negotiations with WEC and with the Japanese government to take valuable currency out of the country to pay for patent rights took a year to complete, but by 1954 Morita had successfully completed the deal. For twenty-five thousand dollars a princely sum in a Japan that had yet to commence its “economic miracle” Tokyo Telecommunications purchased a license to the transistor. WEC had used the transistor to make hearing aids; Ibuka and Morita had another idea that would tap a much larger consumer demand: a transistorized radio.

One year later, after much work to modify the newly acquired transistor for use in a radio, Morita and Ibuka put the first transistor radio on the market in Japan. Though the new product sold well, they were not satisfied; only the radio tubes had been transistorized. After successfully applying the new technology to the loudspeaker and transformer, the company introduced the world’s first pocket-sized transistor radio in 1957.

It was about this time that Tokyo Telecommunications changed its name. Morita insisted that the firm’s name was cumbersome in either Japanese or its English version. Someone looked up the Latin word for sound. “Sonus” sounded nice, but they were searching for something that was a little more catchy. Briefly Morita and Ibuka toyed with “Sonny,” but the overtones of mischievous little boys did not seem appropriate. The word “Sony” was selected, first as the name for the transistor radio and then in January, 1957, as the name of their firm.

The tiny device was an instant success, and for the first time Sony was able to establish a market in the United States, a major turning point in the fortunes of the company. Morita considered offers from an American firm to market the miniaturized radio in the United States under an American brand name. It was tempting for the still tiny Japanese firm to rely on a large American firm to sell the radios in the unfamiliar American market, but Morita rejected the offer, calculating that it was time for Sony to establish its own name abroad no matter how great the obstacles might be.

Accordingly, in 1960, Sony America was established. From its first showroom on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and very soon from Sony retailers all across the country, Americans gradually became familiar with the company’s product line, which soon expanded into transistorized (solid-state) television. It took a decade for the American operation to become profitable, but by the end of the 1960’s Sony had sold more than a million micro-televisions in the United States. The 1970’s would see the introduction of the Trinitron color television, followed by a succession of other products, including the Betamax videocassette recorder and the Walkman portable stereo.

Morita also guided the establishment of Sony’s first major joint-venture agreement, with the American television network CBS in 1966. Other joint ventures and cross-licensing agreements followed, bringing the Japanese firm more and more deeply into both North America and Europe. Further integration occurred when Sony began not only to sell but also to manufacture in the United States in 1972, Morita presided over the groundbreaking ceremonies of its San Diego, California, television plant, which soon employed more than one thousand workers.

As president of Sony America, Morita took up residence in were chosen with his wife and three children in 1962. This allowed him not only to directly manage the affairs of Sony in the United States but also to immerse himself in Western society and deepen his understanding of Western culture. One of his sons was graduated from Georgetown University. Regarding education, Morita noted that, contrary to Japan, many of the business elite in the United States did not possess a university education, an observation that prompted him to write Gakureki muyouron (1966; college education is not always necessary). It became a best seller in Japan.

In the course of his residence abroad, Morita accumulated a wide circle of friends not only in the business world, but among the leaders of the world political and cultural communities as well. He was always in great demand as a speaker and was known for his lively wit and the frank expression of his views. In an era when “trade friction” has dominated American-Japanese economic relations, Morita was an articulate spokesperson for the prevailing Japanese view that the declining competitive position of the United States in world markets can best be explained not by unfair Japanese practices but by shortcomings in the American economy. While praising the innovative accomplishments of American science and technology, Morita faulted the way American business is mesmerized by short-term profits to the neglect of long-term growth. Morita served as president of the Sony Corporation from 1971 to 1976 and served as chair of the board and chief executive officer from 1976 to 1994. He died in Tokyo in 1999.

Significance

Morita was one of the best-known businessmen in the world, and the Sony label, established by Morita and Ibuka, remains a globally recognizable name. The two built the Sony empire from nothing in 1946 to its first billion-dollar sales year in 1973, to a $5-billion-dollar year in 1984, to nearly $70 billion in revenue in 2006. In doing so, they made a major contribution in changing the image enjoyed by Japanese manufactured products throughout the world. At the time when Sony was first introduced to the West, Japanese goods invariably evoked adjectives such as “cheap” and “shoddy” among the consuming public outside Japan. In 1969, after only a decade of experience in international markets, Sony could take pride that the U.S. Apollo mission carrying the first humans to the moon carried Sony tape recorders.

By emphasizing reliability and quality and by producing attractive consumer merchandise at highly competitive prices, Sony, along with a few other companies, caused the “Made in Japan” label to become a symbol of excellence. In addition, Sony proved false the stereotype of Japanese industry as imitators. Its modification and improvement of the transistor and its discovery of radically new uses of that invention proved that the Japanese were skilled at innovation and adaptation.

Bibliography

Abegglen, James C., and George Stalk, Jr. Kaisha: The Japanese Corporation. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Though not exclusively devoted to Morita or Sony, this book does discuss them in the course of explaining how marketing, money, and staffing strategy made the Japanese world pacesetters.

Frailey, Fred, with Mary Lord. “Sony’s No-Baloney Boss.” U.S. News and World Report, November 17, 1986, 57. A brief profile of Morita and Sony that gives some background of the company and of Morita.

Kamioka, Kazuyoshi. Japanese Business Pioneers. Union City, Calif.: Heian International, 1988. In addition to general comments on characteristics of business and management styles in Japan, this book includes chapters devoted to eight corporate leaders in Japan, including Morita.

Luh, Shu Shin. Business the Sony Way: Secrets of the World’s Most Innovative Electronics Giant. Oxford, England: Capstone, 2003. A history of the Sony Corporation detailing its business practices, as well as its technological innovations. Bibliographic references and index.

Lyons, Nick. The Sony Vision. New York: Crown, 1976. An informal company history that is made interesting because Lyons interviewed key Sony figures, including Morita and Ibuka. The book, however, suffers to some degree because the author has little or no specialized expertise concerning Japan. Contains interesting illustrations.

Morita, Akio. “When Sony Was an Up-and-Comer.” Forbes 138 (October 6, 1986): 98-102. A personal account of the first attempts to market the transistor radio in the United States and the relationship of Japanese and American companies.

Morita, Akio, Edwin M. Reingold, and Mitsuko Shimomura. Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986. A highly personalized account of the life and times of Morita and Sony. The book, in addition to autobiographical information, includes extensive commentaries by Morita on such topics as management, the difference between American and Japanese business styles, and world trade.

Nathan, John. Sony: The Private Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Nathan, a professor of Japanese culture, chronicles the history of the Sony Corporation and Morita’s influences.

Weymouth, Lally. “Meet Mr. Sony: How the Japanese Outsmart Us.” The Atlantic, November, 1979. Although brief, this article is a fine interpretive examination of Sony and Morita.