Word: ibuka
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East Meets West. Though heightened competition challenges Sony's current U.S. sales rate of 15,000 midget TV sets per month, President Masaru Ibuka, 55, an engineer, plans to double production by late autumn and points out that he has overcome hurdles before. After spending the war trying to concoct a heat-ray gun for the Japanese armed forces, Ibuka, along with Morita, assembled $530 and eight displaced technicians in a bomb-gutted department store. They started making radio gear...
Many other Japanese tried and failed at the same thing, but Sony succeeded by blending Eastern industriousness with modern Western business technique. The company favors hard-sell advertising, channels about 4.5% of sales into research, and is quick to add its own twist to what others invent. Brags Ibuka: "We have always been the first to see the possibilities in any new discovery and translate it into practical, useful items." After U.S. scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories developed the transistor, Sony became the first non-U.S. company to make transistor radios. Older and bigger Japanese companies soon began competing...
Instant Action. Helped by new products, Ibuka expects Sony's sales to rise 25% this year. Sony is working on a miniature color TV set and a light weight, transistorized videotape recorder that turns out instant movies. This week Sony will deliver its first recorders to U.S. customers. The cost is still high ($10,900), but Sony expects to sell a thousand by next June - mostly in the U.S. - to schools, research labs, and even race tracks...
Sony stock, for example, rose from $1.67 to $3.81 in the last 2½ months as its ex ports soared. Founded only twelve years ago by Masaru Ibuka. a onetime radio-station repairman, Sony now exports 25,000 pocket radios a month to the U.S. and Canada, will soon introduce a portable, all-transistor TV set. Next month it will also start exporting a new semiconductor that it invented: a "tunnel diode." U.S. companies have found it so superior to present diodes for many uses that Gen eral Electric, RCA and others are hustling to mass-produce their...
Last week Japanese electronics leaders were sharply divided over how hard to push exports of finished consumer products. Ibuka, whose radio exports rose from 32,000 sets in January to 55,000 in March, intends to keep on exporting under his own label. To avoid arousing a protectionist outcry in the U.S., many Japanese manufacturers think a better way to keep on growing is to sell components to U.S. companies to assemble, thus dividing up the work and the profit...