Word: marketized
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...Walkman wasn't a giant leap forward in engineering: magnetic cassette technology had been around since 1963, when the Netherlands-based electronics firm Philips first created it for use by secretaries and journalists. Sony, who by that point had become experts in bringing well-designed, miniaturized electronics to market (they debuted their first transistor radio in 1955), made a series of moderately successful portable cassette recorders. But the introduction of pre-recorded music tapes in the late 1960s opened a whole new market. People still chose to listen to vinyl records over cassettes at home, but the compact size...
...portable CD player a year after the first compact discs were sold, and later rolled out MiniDisc and MP3 players under the Walkman brand. (Its insistence for several years on sticking to a proprietary digital music format, ATRAC, left it far behind Apple's iPod in terms of market share.) Since its launch, Sony has released more than 300 different models across all formats; it currently makes Walkman-branded MP3 players, phones and even portable DVD players. Its newest device, the Walkman NWZ-X1000, features a 3-inch OLED screen, 32 gigabytes of memory and WiFi connectivity. But the company...
...dotcom and property bubbles before it, the nascent IPO mania is being inflated by outsize expectations and good old-fashioned greed. Retail investors are growing tired of keeping their cash in banks that pay next to nothing in interest and are increasingly fearful of missing out on the stock market's continuing rise...
When the outlandish stock-market events of 2009 are tallied up, the initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong of Chinese herbal shampoo maker Bawang International will be a standout. Within 10 minutes of the June 22 opening of the subscription period for shares, one local brokerage, Bright Smart Securities, was swamped with the equivalent of $129 million in orders. In all, the shampoo company received more than $9 billion in orders from Hong Kong retail investors for an IPO that initially sought to raise just $215 million...
...Have Ben Bernanke's green shoots magically turned into tropical forests overnight? Hardly. There may be some justification for how stock-market indexes in the U.S. and Hong Kong have soared from their lows in March, when it seemed the global economy was sliding off a cliff. But this incipient IPO mania is a different story. Investors are bidding up the stocks of Chinese companies not because their shares had been unfairly pummeled, but because of expectations for future growth that...