Akio Morita
Akio Morita, the renowned founder of Sony, was born on January of 1921 to a family of sake brewers in Nagoya city.
His family has been in the brewing business for almost 400 years. Akio Morita’s strict father had raised him and prepared him to become the heir to the Morita’s family business. Even as a student, Akio Morita attended several company meetings with his father.
Other than sake and business meetings however, Akio Morita found himself more and more interested with physics, math and electronic appliances as the years went by. In fact, whenever he was free from household chores, Akio Morita would spend some time tinkering with the phonograph. Because of that, Akio Morita chose to attend the Osaka Imperial University’s Physics Department right after his graduation from high school.
However, since his country was in the middle of the Pacific war during that time, Akio Morita was forced to become a Navy lieutenant right after he finished college. After the war, Akio Morita went on to pursue his interests and decided to establish a new company together with his friend Masaru Ibuka.
In 1946, the pair put up a telecommunications engineering company known as the Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Throughout the years, Morita worked on leading the company in the areas of globalization, finance, marketing, and human resources while his partner Ibuka worked on the company’s product development and technological research.
In 1958, both Akio Morita and Ibuka decided to change the company’s name into Sony. A number of the products launched by the company can be credited to the innovative ideas and creativity of Akio Morita. His groundbreaking ideas led to the development of a few major changes in the people’s lifestyle.
He was the man behind such brilliant ideas as the video cassette recorder and the Walkman.