Sony Corporation 7-35, Kitashinagawa 6-chome, Shinagawa-ku Tokyo 141, Japan
Profile: Sony Corporation is a conglomerant that sypplies consumer electiomics and multimedia. Their supply of consumer electronics products include: TVs, VCRs, Stereos, andmore. The sales of video and stereo equiptment` company's total earnings. Sony's assets in the entertainment industry include: Colombia Pictures, Tri-Star Pictures film studios, Colombia and Epic records and the SOny Playstation, a multimedia gaming system, and assorted other electronic components. Sony is also in the front of the field in up and coming consumer products, many of them on the front lines of innovation. These include, among others: Net-TVs, new digital TVs, CD-Roms and other similiar versions, digital cellular telephones, and the Mini-Disk music medium. Sony is also in the finance and insurance buisness. As you can see, Sony is well adapted to change with today's economy, being as diverse as it is. It has left its self many aveneues to follow, depending on how the future of the technology buisness unfolds.
History: The Company was established in Japan in May 1946 as Tokyo Ts` Kabushiki Kaisha. In January 1958, it changed its name to Sony Kabushiki Kaisha (Sony Corporation in English). Sony is engaged in the development, manufacture, and sale of various kinds of electronic equipment, instruments, and devices. Sony's principal manufacturing facilities are located in Japan, the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and its products are marketed by sales subsidiaries and unaffiliated local distributors throughout the world. In addition to internationalizing its production operations, Sony has promoted the transfer of research and development activities and management functions overseas to bring its overseas operations in even closer contact with local communities. Sony is also engaged worldwide in the development, production, manufacture, and distribution of recorded music, in all commercial formats and musical genres, and image-based software, including film, video, television, and new entertainment technologies. These activities are carried on principally through Sony Music Entertainment Inc. (SMEI), Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc. (SMEJ), and Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE). In addition, Sony conducts insurance and financing business mainly in Japan.
Plans: The Company restructured its R&D operations as part of an overall corporate reorganization on April 1, 1997. To meet the diverse product-related needs of its various businesses, the Company actively carries out R&D at each of its independent companies. Strategic R&D relating to the entire Sony Group, particularly the development of new key technologies, is delegated to six corporate laboratories, the Research Center, the Advanced Production Laboratory, the Architecture Laboratory, the Advanced Development Laboratory, the Media Processing Laboratory, and the Information Technology Laboratory, as well as the D21 Laboratory. These facilities are located in Tokyo and Kanagawa prefecture in Japan and directly controlled by corporate headquarters. The Company's R&D operations are focusing on such fields as electronic materials technologies, basic devices, semiconductor technologies, software and hardware architectures for information and network products, optical discs and magnetic recording technologies, signal processing technologies, computer technologies, as well as long-term R&D themes based on visions of the 21st century. In the U.S., there are Research Laboratories, which specialize in R&D fields such as digital signal processing, DTV, telecommunications, broadcasting systems, semiconductors, and display technology. There are additional development centers in the U.K., Germany, Belgium, and Singapore. R&D expenses were 239.2 billion yen in the fiscal year ended March 31, 1995; 257.3 billion yen in the fiscal year ended March 31, 1996; and 282.6 billion yen in the fiscal year ended March 31, 1997. Sony believes R&D activities are vital to its long-term growth in elec` - - A high-capacity optical disc which offers a single-sided storage capacity of 12 Gigabytes (GB) on a 12 cm-diameter disc. This technolog` allows the recording and playback of high-bit-rate video signals with a high access rate. - - Digital Reality Creation technology which creates a super-real four times picture resolution from a standard television signal. This technology allows very high resolution picture quality from conventional TV broadcasts and other video sources. - - A real-time MPEG2 video encoder LSI which features the industry's widest motion search area and integrates MPEG2 encoding system controller and motion estimation circuitry onto a single chip. This technology allows high quality encoding of even the most rapidly moving scenes and video taken with fast camera movements.